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

This is a detailed account of the British and German steel industries' performances during three decades that were marked by radical changes in technology, in sources of raw materials and in product markets. Relying on governmental and corporate archives as well as on the contemporary trade literature, Professor Wengenroth has drawn a meticulous picture of how managements in the two countries met strategic problems raised by these changes. The author does not however, merely trace technological developments; rather he uses them as a backdrop for a contribution to the long-running debate on Britain's relative industrial decline in the late nineteenth century. Was this the result of massive entrepreneurial failure or was it merely the by-product of evolutionary changes that bestowed automatic competitive advantage on latecomers such as the Germans? The author argues a detailed case for the latter scenario and, in doing so, makes a major contribution to the debate on the 'Great Depression'.

This book is an abridgement and translation of Guillermo Lora's five-volume history. It deals with the strengthening and radicalisation of Bolivia's organised labour movement, which culminated in the drastic revolutionary changes of the 1950s. The first half offers a reinterpretation of Bolivian history in the century preceding the revolution, viewed from the perspective of the working class. The second half discusses in more detail the major political events and doctrinal issues of a period in which the author, as secretary of the Trotskyist Partido Obrero Revolucionario, himself frequently played an active part. Despite the radical upheaval that occurred in the fifties and the mobilisation of broad sectors of the population around such radical objectives as direct property seizures, union-nominated ministers and union, military and worker control, the labour movement was unable to maintain its conquests in the 1960s. The concluding chapters describe the period of renewed military repression and the continuing efforts of the labour movement to resist.

A pioneering study of the social aspects of industrialisation in a developing country in tropical Africa. Though industrial workers form a relatively small proportion of the Ghanaian population, they represent the 'modern' sector of the economy and industrial jobs are much sought after by school leavers. The occupational and migration histories, the work and home lives of these men and women are examined in the framework of current theories of modernity to demonstrate the effects of industrialisation in those countries where the process has not yet gone very far. This book surveys the field of industrialisation in Ghana and its effects through such other factors as migration. It provides a valuable comparison both with industrialisation elsewhere and with other aspects of African social life.

New approaches in economic, social, labour and institutional history have re-examined guilds - not least within the framework of a re-appraisal of the classic distinction between the "capitalist" and "pre-capitalist" modes of production. These fresh approaches are unravelling the reasons why guilds were established, and why they could maintain themselves so long. International comparisons have fostered this rejuvenation of guild studies; awareness is growing that guilds are not just a European phenomenon, but have been prominent all over Northern Africa and the Middle East, as well as in many parts of Asia, including China and Japan. This volume attempts to set up a comparative framework to analyse the functioning of guilds from West to East, in the period between Classical Antiquity and the Industrial Revolution.

There has been considerable controversy amongst social and economic historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists and other specialists concerning the nature and structure of Latin American agrarian society. An increasing number of studies have come to challenge the traditionally accepted view that the backwardness of rural Latin America and its resistance to 'modernisation' are due to the persistence of feudal or non-feudal forms of social and economic organisation. Instead attention has shifted to an examination of the social and economic dislocations resulting from attempts to impose capitalist forms of agrarian enterprise on peasant or pre-capitalist societies. This book of essays by an international group of scholars represents a substantial empirical contribution to the ongoing debate. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in the field, but also to anyone wishing to understand the historical processes underlying contemporary Latin America's complex land tenure and rural employment problems.

This comprehensive study of farming methods and agrarian organization in Russia before the time of Peter the Great shifts the emphasis from the great estates to the basic production unit, the peasant family farms, and uses archaeological and enthnographic materials to supplement the documentary evidence. The methods of production and the farm implements used are described in detail and Professor Smith argues that features inherent in peasant farming account for Russian backwardness during this period. Part I classifies and describes the range of agrarian activities carried on in Muscovy - arable farming, hayfields, livestock, and gathering from the forest - and presents a model of a hypothetical farm unit; Part II examines three regions -Moscow, Toropets and Kazan - which stretch across central European Russia; and Part III provides a chapter on the relationship between peasant farming and the state.

Economic historians have long appreciated the important role of the Lowther family in the developing Whitehaven from a tiny fishing village into a flourishing industrial centre. In Coal and Tobacco, Dr Beckett has attempted, by analysing the west Cumberland economy, and the Lowther's entrepreneurial role, to reveal the vital importance of the coal industry. Since much of the coal was sold in Ireland, west Cumberland moved into a relationship with Dublin which was similar to, albeit on a smaller scale than, the more famous link between Tyneside and London. The coal trade provided the vital economic underpinning, but geographical considerations help to explain Whitehaven's other trading interests. Dr Beckett's major study is based on the Lowther papers, and reveals the crucial family involvement in these events. This book documents Lowther's story: how close he came to success, why he failed, and the impact of his ambitions on west Cumberland.

Although Austria-Hungary was one of the largest and most important states in Europe until 1914, the rich literature on economic history has almost completely neglected this area. Professor Rudolph's book serves two main purposes. It is an extensive descriptive and analytical study of the process of industrialization in the Austrian half of the monarchy. It also carefully examines the role of banks in the industrialization of the area. The fundamental question at the heart of the study is the extent to which the banks actually did facilitate or hinder the process of industrialization. The book should be of major import to students of economic history, economic development, and east and central European history.

This book provides a detailed study of how manufacturing and processing industries have developed in the largest country of West Africa. Three chapters devoted to import substitution examine the interaction of growing consumer demand and the market strategy objectives of foreign merchant firms which produced the sudden spurt of industrialization in the late 1950s. It is shown that conventional government promotion policies played an insignificant role in triggering industrial development. Subsequent chapters present analyses of Nigeria's processing industries, applied industrial research, labour supply and productivity, technical education, industrial relations and indigenous entrepreneurial performance. The study goes beyond questions of efficiency in allocating resources, to underlying organizational and institutional factors. Professor Kilby concludes by isolating key problems in the industrialization process and by suggesting an optimum development strategy.

The incidence of industrial conflict and the nature of workplace industrial relations have occupied a central place in public and academic commentary on British society. Debate about the role of the trade unions in the state, the degree of authority that the unions can and should exercise over their members, the desirability of a legal framework for collective agreements, the nature of rank and file militancy and the means and techniques of re-establishing employers' authority over the work in the face of an expanded workers' frontier of control all lie at the heart of the social crisis that marked British society from the end of the 1960s.

This is a study of industrial unrest in the cotton industry at a time when the economy was on the threshold of mid-Victorian prosperity, and when Chartism was still much more than a memory. The town of Preston was the crucial battlefield, and here the masters and men fought out a bitter trial of strength. The strike of 1853-54 closed the Preston cotton industry for seven months, and disrupted production in many other towns in Lancashire. Against the implacable opposition of the masters, the strikers toured the country to organize support, and raised GBP100,000 in subscriptions from their fellow operatives. The dispute featured prominently in the national and provincial press, and the weavers' delegates, notably George Cowell and Mortimer Grimshaw, became celebrities overnight. After five months, the employers brought in blackleg labour, and when the detested `knobsticks' failed to break the strike they had the operatives' leaders arrested. These moves did not deter the cotton workers, who were forced back to work only when their financial reserves were exhausted. Their campaign ended defiantly, as it had begun, with cries of `Ten Per Cent still, and no surrender'. This book is their story.

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.

'No other group of workers in the history of the English working-class has received more sympathy and less scholarly attention than the handloom weavers of the Lancashire cotton industry during the Industrial Revolution.' Mr Bythell's is a detailed study of this important group. His aim is to examine the transition from the domestic system to the factory system in cotton weaving in the first half of the nineteenth century. He provides detailed information on the geographical distribution of handloom weaving, the size and structure of the labour force, the varying history of employment, wages and standard of life, the efforts made by the weavers to alleviate their distress through industrial and political action, and their final displacement and disappearance. The results of his research enable Mr Bythell to challenge several of the generally accepted views about the weavers.

No industry provides more household names than brewing; none retains a firmer place in British culture; and at the height of the temperance movement none was more controversial. Yet this volume provides an extended account of brewing in the modern period. Thoroughly based upon research in brewing archives, it surveys the industry from 1830 to 1980, tracing its development from one in which there were thousands of firms producing beer to one now dominated by half a dozen large companies. It is an account which carries the reader from the porters, ales and stouts, the vast vats, drays and myriad beer houses of early Victorian England, to the draught lagers, giant fermenters, beer tankers and theme pubs of the late twentieth century. In this wide-ranging book the authors discuss free trade in beer, the impact of temperance, and the emergence of the great Victorian breweries together with their acquisition of public houses and company status. In the twentieth century, they examine the impact of two World Wars, the movement for improved public houses, the sobriety of the 1920s, and the revolution sweeping the industry since the 1950s.

In Fighting Deindustrialisation, Andy Clark outlines and examines one of the most significant and under-researched periods in modern Scottish labour history. Over a fourteen month period in 1981 and 1982, as Scotland suffered the effects of the accelerated deindustrialisation of its economy, three workforces refused to accept the loss of their jobs. The predominantly women assembly workers at Lee Jeans (Greenock), Lovable Bra (Cumbernauld), and Plessey Capacitors (Bathgate) were informed that their multinational employers had taken the decisions to close their plants. At each site, a battle was fought against capital movement, corporate greed, and unfair jobloss. The workers occupied their factories and refused to vacate until their demands were met and closure avoided. At all sites this objective was achieved; none of the factories completely closed following the women's occupations. In this book, these occupations are analysed together for the first time, through a range of analytical frameworks from oral history, memory studies, industrial relations scholarship, and deindustrialisation studies. In his extensive examination, Clark argues that the actions of 1981-82 should be considered as one of the most significant periods in Scotland's history of deindustrialisation. However, the public memory of 1981-82 is precarious; Fighting Deindustrialisation begins the process of incorporating women's militant resistance within academic and popular understandings of working-class activism in later 20th century-Scotland.

This book examines an important phenomenon for competitiveness and innovation in industry: namely the growing use of scientific principles in industrial research. Industrial innovation still arises from systematic trial-and-error experiments with many designs and objects, but these experiments are being guided by a more rational understanding of phenomena. This has important implications for market structure, firm strategies and competition. Science and Innovation focuses on the pharmaceutical industry. It discusses the changes that the notable advances in the life sciences since the 1980s have exerted on the strategies of drug companies, the organization of their internal research, their relationships with scientific institutions, the division of labour between large pharmaceutical firms and small research-intensive suppliers, the productivity of drug discovery and the productivity of R & D.

It was not until the eighteenth century that books became widely available throughout the whole of England. Publishing remained largely London-based, but the provincial market grew steadily in importance. In this study, drawing on a wide range of primary sources, John Feather traces the economic, social and cultural forces which made possible this fundamental change, and assesses the impact of the metropolitan printed word on provincial society. He discusses the important issues of copyright and piracy; the various financial arrangements between booksellers and publishers; and above all the elaborate distribution and agency systems that enabled London publishers to retain their effective stranglehold by penetrating the provincial market at every level.

This book examines how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary factory workers to become effective unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s. We follow Chicago workers as they make choices about whether to attend ethnic benefit society meetings or to go to the movies, whether to shop in local neighborhood stores or patronize the new A & P. Although workers may not have been political in traditional terms during the '20s, as they made daily decisions like these, they declared their loyalty in ways that would ultimately have political significance. As the depression worsened in the 1930s, not only did workers find their pay and working hours cut or eliminated, but the survival strategies they had developed during the 1920s were undermined. Looking elsewhere for help, workers adopted new ideological perspectives and overcame longstanding divisions among themselves to mount new kinds of collective action. Chicago workers' experiences as citizens, ethnics and blacks, wage earners and consumers all converged to make them into New Deal Democrats and CIO unionists. First printed in 1990, Making a New Deal has become an established classic in American History. The second edition includes a new preface by Lizabeth Cohen.

For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses in search of cheap labor and almost no oversight. Imperial Food Products was one of those businesses. The company set up shop in Hamlet in the 1980s. Workers who complained about low pay and hazardous working conditions at the plant were silenced or fired. But jobs were scarce in town, so workers kept coming back, and the company continued to operate with impunity. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the never-inspected chicken-processing plant a stone's throw from Hamlet's city hall burst into flames. Twenty-five people perished that day behind the plant's locked and bolted doors. It remains one of the deadliest accidents ever in the history of the modern American food industry. Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past in the United States. However, as award-winning historian Bryant Simon shows, the pursuit of cheap food merged with economic decline in small towns across the South and the nation to devalue laborers and create perilous working conditions. The Hamlet fire and its aftermath reveal the social costs of antiunionism, lax regulations, and ongoing racial discrimination. Using oral histories, contemporary news coverage, and state records, Simon has constructed a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that exposes how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was destined to result in tragedy.

Australians have become increasingly visible outside of the country as speakers and actors in radio and television, their media moguls have frequently bought up foreign companies, and people around the world have been able to enjoy such Australian productions as The Flying Doctors, Neighbours, and Kath and Kim. The origins, early development and later adaptations of radio and television show how Australia has gone from being a minor and rather parochial player to being a significant part of the international scene. The Historical Dictionary of Australian Radio and Television provides essential facts and information concerning the Australian radio and television industry. This is accomplished through the use of a chronology, a list of acronyms and abbreviations, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on directors, producers, writers, actors, television and radio series, and television and radio stations.

This book, first published in 2007, offers a bold new interpretation of American business history during the formative years 1870-1920, which mark the dawn of modern big business. It focuses on four major revolutions that ushered in this new era: those in power, transportation, communication, and organization. Using the metaphor of America as an economic hothouse uniquely suited to rapid economic growth during these years, it analyzes the interplay of key factors such as entrepreneurial talent, technology, land, natural resources, law, mass markets, and the rise of cities. It also delineates the process that laid the foundation for the modern era, in which virtually every human activity became a business, and, in most cases, a big business. The book also profiles numerous major entrepreneurs whose careers and activities illustrate broader trends and themes. It utilizes a wide variety of sources, including novels from the period, to produce a lively narrative.

This book, first published in 2007, offers a bold new interpretation of American business history during the formative years 1870-1920, which mark the dawn of modern big business. It focuses on four major revolutions that ushered in this new era: those in power, transportation, communication, and organization. Using the metaphor of America as an economic hothouse uniquely suited to rapid economic growth during these years, it analyzes the interplay of key factors such as entrepreneurial talent, technology, land, natural resources, law, mass markets, and the rise of cities. It also delineates the process that laid the foundation for the modern era, in which virtually every human activity became a business, and, in most cases, a big business. The book also profiles numerous major entrepreneurs whose careers and activities illustrate broader trends and themes. It utilizes a wide variety of sources, including novels from the period, to produce a lively narrative.

The majority of workers in South Asia are employed in industries that rely on manual labour and craft skills. Some of these industries have existed for centuries and survived great changes in consumption and technology over the last 150 years. In earlier studies, historians of the region focused on mechanized rather than craft industries, arguing that traditional manufacturing was destroyed or devitalized during the colonial period, and that 'modern' industry is substantially different. Exploring material from research into five traditional industries, Tirthankar Roy's book contests these notions, demonstrating that while traditional industry did evolve during the Industrial Revolution, these transformations had a positive rather than destructive effect on manufacturing generally. In fact, the book suggests, the major industries in post-independence India were shaped by such transformations. Tirthankar Roy's book offers penetrating insights into India's economic and social history.