Book Description
The Industrial Revolution has sometimes been regarded as a catastrophe which desecrated the English landscape and brought social opporession and appalling physical hardship to the workers. In this book, however, it is presented as an important and beneficial mark of progress. In spite of destructive wars and a rapid growth of population, the material living standards of most of the British people improved, and the technical innovations not only brought economic rewards but also provoked greater intellectual ingenuity. Innovation is therefore seen by Ashton not just as an economic course but as a social and cultural process influenced by factors such as war and peace and the framework of law and institutions. Lucidly argued and authoritative, this bookplaces the phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution in a stimulating perpsective. A new Preface by Professor Pat Hudson outlines the results of recent research precipitated by Ashton's themes: the true causes of population growth in the eighteenth century, the nature of the supply of capital, and the new approaches to labour studies amongst others. This Preface places The Industrial Revolution in its contemporary context, and a new thoroughly updated bibliography means that fifty years on, Ashton's work can continue to be of value to modern readers.
Customer Reviews:
A solid, no-nonsense book about an important subject.......1999-10-12
First published in 1948, this book has gone through many editions, the latest, as we can see here, put out in 1998. I recently read the 1964 edition, picked up long ago at a booksale in Melbourne, Australia. Ashton's work is probably timeless. It is a down-to-earth, very well reasoned history of the various historical tendencies and phenomena that together are called "the industrial revolution". I cannot vouch for this volume being absolutely correct. The author does not have much time for those who dwell on the evils of industrialization, or who want to include class struggle in their analysis. Though I was not fully convinced of this, still I was willing to listen. Not being an expert in the field, I was looking for a decent explanation or summary of the whole process. I definitely got my money's worth in Ashton's book. It is well-written, without jargon and without presumption of vast historical knowledge on the part of the reader. It gives you an overview of such various fields as population growth, early forms of industry in England, the technical innovations, capital, banking, labor unions, conditions of workers, industrialists' clubs, and relation of agriculture to industry. Though I found the part about banks and interest rather rough going, it was entirely due to my own poor understanding of the field. My edition could have used a map. The shires, the rivers, and the many towns of England are not all imprinted firmly in the brains of North Americans. Other than that, I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve their understanding of the Industrial Revolution.
simply delightful to read as well as a thorough resource.......1998-12-04
I can't believe I'm the first to write about this. I bought this a few years back while a graduate student in modern European history. My focus was primarily industrialization. This book is a joy. Ashton provides a thorough picture of the Revolution from several perspectives. He describes how events and developments built upon each other and how the innovators fed each others efforts. Most importantly, Ashton is a terrific writer. Other books on this and like topics can be as dry as the Sahara. Ashton is engaging and witty. This is not a book that requires a terrifically large committment. Even if you are not a student but simply interested in the topic, please read this.
Book Description
"Almost criminal in its housebreaking, burglarizing, second-story genius."—James Kincaid, University of Southern California
The Victorian age is much closer to us in time than we might believe. Yet at that time, in the most technologically advanced nation in the world, people buried meat in fresh earth to prevent mold forming and wrung sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. Such household drudgery was routinely performed by the grandparents of people still living, but the knowledge of it has passed as if it had never been.
Judith Flanders's book is laid out like a Victorian house, taking you through the story of daily life from room to room. In each space she depicts the home's furnishings and decoration: from childbirth in the master bedroom, through the scullery and kitchen, the separate male and female domains of the drawing room and the parlor, and ending in the sickroom. A rich selection from diaries, letters, advice books, magazines, and paintings fills the rooms with the people and personalities of the age. 100 illustrations, 3 8-page color inserts.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent read.......2007-10-20
This takes all the usual primary sources--the records of Beatrix Potter and Jane Carlyle, the diary of Munby's lover, Mayhew, Beeton, etc.--as well as some less well known sources and packages it in a largely accurate and very attractive whole. The book is very well written and doesn't often engage in the broad stereotypes and sensationalism that tends to predominate mass market-oriented books on the Victorian age.
Occasionally, Flanders' own inexperience in MODERN parenting and housekeeping come through. For example, she thinks that infant febrile seizures described in Beeton are sheer fantasy rather than a common side effect to high fever, and several of her other comments about children leave me wondering how much contact she's had with those under the age of 10. She also has a weirdly 1950s throwback attitude toward breastfeeding, seeming to see it as something dirty and horrible that women were forced to go through and characterizing their babies as "vampires." (As opposed to the patriarchally imposed formula that doctors invented because a male doctor can do so much better for a baby than a mere female can who has no benefit of scientific and hygienic MEDICINE. Erm. Okay, my prejudices are showing here, but sheesh, breastfeeding has been a right that women have had to fight for ever since the male medical establishement shoved a bottle of condensed cow mild into our collective hands.)
She's also no experienced hand in the kitchen--she's astonished over how MANY things are needed for a complete kitchen while any modern cook would be astonished that a kitchen was considered to be fully outfitted with so FEW. This means that her section on the kitchen and food preparation isn't nearly as insightful as some of her other chapters--she just has no frame of reference for discussing much of it. This section would have been much more helpful coming from someone who could really recognize differences.
Other times, she sensationalizes slightly, taking nontypical examples of the treatment of women (particularly those of girls) and of Victorian prudery and painting them as more mainstream than they were. I really wish that the section on children were stronger, but I feel, again, that her experience is failing her here.
Overall, however, she does an excellent job in making a broad topic digestible, fascinating, and comprehensible to any reader.
Exploring the middle class home and psyche.......2007-08-28
I've always been interested in the Victorian period of English history, especially in the ways that people lived. Most books that detail the daily lives of people are geared towards the upper classes, with their grand estates in the country, and imposing townhouses. The working classes have been summed up with conditions of appalling poverty, overcrowding and misery. But what about the middle classes, those professional workers and merchants that were suddenly new consumers and riding the crest of the Industrial Revolution?
Researcher Judith Flanders takes a look at their world, and particularly through the eyes of the women who were often the silent, but determined decision makers in how their homes were run and organized. How she presents this information is the interesting part -- she describes this world and the people in it through the rooms of a typical middle-class home. It is also a look at the lives of the Victorians as they progress from room to room, from birth and the nursery, to death and the sickroom. It is also predominately the world of women, where the father of the household is a somewhat distant presence, there to provide the financial means, and perhaps a dominating effect, but also rather remote from the day to day workings of the family.
Where this book becomes the real draw is when Flanders describes each room in turn, drawing on the journals, homekeeping books and manuals, and the memoirs of the time. A good deal of the book is given not just to how each room was decorated and furnished, but also how it was kept clean, and how it was used, and if it was a room meant to be for private -- such as the nursery, bedrooms, and the workplaces such as the kitchen and scullery.
Public or rather, reception rooms were the Drawing Room, the Dining Room, and the Parlor. Often the Dining room and parlor would be one and the same in many homes, with the Drawing room having the best furniture and items, and saved for when visitors came and the best impressions to be made. The dining room was often where the lady of the house stayed during the day, where she did her letter-writing and account keeping, and often would teach her children, and oversee her servants.
Workplaces in the home were the Kitchen and Scullery, where meals were prepared, and clothing and dishes washed. Often this was where the servants slept if there wasn't any spare room for them. It was also where the greatest battle against bugs, rats and mice were often fought -- one description in the narrative depicts three visiting housemaids clutching each other in terror in the night atop the kitchen table as the floor 'heaved' with cockroaches. Other duties included the laundry, a laborious, backbreaking chore that took a week to complete, only to be started again almost immediately. More than any other chapters, these made me bless those inventors who have come up with such staples as modern ranges, the refrigerator, and especially the washer and dryer.
Another innovation in the Victorian home was the bathroom. And we're not just talking about bathtubs either -- in the homes of the upper middle classes, and the aristocracy, there were enough servants to haul tins of hot water up and down stairs to fill a hip bath for washing, but for more basic needs there was the odorous chamberpot, a device that had to be emptied, and scoured clean several times a day. No wonder when nonporous pipe was invented, the creation of indoor plumbing and the flush toilet were embraced so happily, especially when typhoid and cholera epidemics swept through England.
Bedrooms were for sleeping, but they could also reflect the inhabitant's likes, and often served as a retreat from busier parts of the house. The study was the man of the house's own retreat from the feminine, usually done up in dark, masculine colours. And then there was the nursery, where the youngest members of the family usually grew up in, until they had a bedroom of their own -- shared with other siblings of the same sex, or they were packed off to formal schooling.
All in all, I found this to be a remarkable book, full of information about the last half of the nineteenth century. Flanders' writing style is full of wit, and some pretty canny observations. We're not so far from our Victorian ancestors either -- a great deal of our own attitudes still linger. Keeping up with the Jones's isn't a new concept at all, and neither is the idea that a clean, beautiful home is equal to moral cleaniness as well. Flanders' insights into modern domestic thought is very revealing and worth the time to read this book.
The text has plenty of illustrations, along with several full-colour inserts. The research is top notch, and the writing style is lively and full of some tongue in cheek humor. Some things are covered that I thought had nothing to do with homes, but actually were, such as the art of the social call, with cards; the etiquette of 'At-Homes;' the elaborate rituals of mourning in behavior and clothing; and even the debate about corsetry and whether to tight-lace or not. It's not a quick book to read, but a very insightful one. There are extensive notes, bibliography and plenty of suggestions as to where to go next if any particular topic interests you.
Anyone who is interested in how the Victorians lived from day to day should try to find this one. It's a well-done book full of details and intimacies of London, and gives some new theories and revelations about that most misunderstood creature, the Victorian woman.
Five stars.
Thank God I'm Mod!.......2007-03-30
To start off with, I have never been very interested in the Victorian period, because it always seemed stultifyingly dull and hyper-religious. I'm not one of those women who coo and ooh about how "romantic!" everything was, and I find the novels insanely unreadable.
So, you're saying, Why did you buy this book? Well, because I couldn't find the book I really wanted, was browsing, pulled it off the shelf, read a page, and thought, "This is actually interesting!"
The book details in a very readable, conversational fashion the way home life was lived: cleaning, cooking, childrearing, servant/employer relations, and host of other things. It gives a fascinating picture of a daily life...that absolutely SUCKED! Anybody who read this book and didn't come away horrified missed the point. Without spoiling the details, let me just say that life back then was seriously worse than now. I can't imagine finishing the book, picking up my copy of *Victoria* magazine, and sighing, "Gosh, for the good old days!" I'd be tearing up my subscription and looking for a new historical period to be interested in.
But that's just me. Anyhow, I'm pretty sure that more than a few Victorian housewives took the Martha Stewart approach, reading the guidebooks more for entertainment than anything, and maybe occasionally trying one of the ideas, but hardly conforming to the ideal in every detail. I also doubt that every family was as rude and condescending to their daughters and servants as the book says. Victorian women certainly had a pathetic position relative to us today, but it's hard to believe life was sheer hell for every single one of them. That's the reason I gave the book three stars. The writing merits four, but I'm not convinced it's a balanced portrait. Even so, I'm not sorry I bought the book, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone.
The Home as Castle.......2006-12-20
A couple years ago someone coined the term, "cocooning" to describe what they saw as the "trend that sees individuals socializing less and retreating into their home more."
But this is hardly a new phenomenon - in fact, it's actually a Victorian ideal, one admirably expounded on in "Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England" by Judith Flanders.
It was during the Victorian era that advances in technology and transportation made it possible (and even desirable) for people to work someplace other than the home. We take it for granted now, but 150 years ago you had to live where you worked. Think about it: the farmer (obviously) lived on his farm; the shopkeeper above his store. If you were in the lower classes, work often consisted of piecework, assembled in the home. With the rise of an increasingly affluent middle-class, it was now possible to remove your family from the dirt, crowds and crime of the city to the more bucolic environs of the country or suburbs. And we've been doing it ever since.
As I said, we take this for granted today - but in the Victorian era it was a new concept and became something of a mania for all but the poorest in the population. The separation of the public life from private living was described by Dickens:
"The office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle [his house in the suburbs] behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me... "
And on page 8:
"Oh, how dull and dreary is the best society I fall into compared with the circle of my own Fire Side with my Love sitting opposite irradiating all around her, and my most extraordinary boy!"
For how many of us is home and family a bulwark against all the pressures of work and the outside world? It's an incredible blessing and not everyone is lucky enough to have it.
I've noticed that a few other reviewers have commented on what they perceive to be a feminist bias in the author's work. I'm a pretty conservative guy (read my other reviews) and I never felt like Judith Flanders was doing anything except giving as honest a portrayal of Victorian life as was possible. The book is heavily footnoted and well documented. Many of the more troubling comments (the breastfeeding child as vampire, for example) are not the author's opinion, but the opinion of the Victorians themselves. I found it amusing in places to see how our twenty-first century prejudices color how we can look back at beliefs and practices that were no more remarkable in their time than referring to a woman as Ms is in ours. As I've counseled in other reviews, don't read any deeper than the text on the page, gentle reader. You'll enjoy the book a lot more if you don't waste your time trying to divine some political or social meaning beyond the written words.
"Inside the Victorian Home" is a fascinating look at the daily lives of middle-class Victorians and I highly recommend it.
Fascinating view of the life of the past.......2006-08-26
I do hope that potential readers will read the publisher's comments, professional reviews, and positive reviews because they give a much more accurate account of the contents of the book than the rather nasty reviews by some readers. (Having read the book, it seems to me the reviewers have more of an ax to grind than does the author.) As an avid reader of Victorian novels over more than 50 years I found information on every page that threw light on the lost customs of the Victorians (the amazing system of visiting cards; the social complexities of meals and mealtimes; the astonishingly hard work involved in maintaining the home; the amazingly complex rituals involved in mourning; the problem of food adulteration). Every topic covered is illuminated. Plus, this book is a delight to read from first word to last. I recommend it without reservation to any reader of Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, and Arnold Bennett.
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Crime, Gender And Consumer Culture In Nineteenth-Century England (The History of Retailing and Consumption)
Tammy C. Whitlock
Manufacturer: Ashgate Publishing
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ASIN: 0754652076 |
Book Description
In this pathbreaking work, now available in paperback, Charles Tilly challenges all previous formulations of state development in Europe. Specifically, Tilly charges that most available explanations fail because they do not account for the great variety of kinds of states which were viable at different stages of European history, and because they assume a unilinear path of state development resolving in today's national state. In his concise and readable style, Tilly demonstrates how various interactions between the wielders of coercion and the manipulators of capital produced three major types of states which prevailed during long periods of European history: tribute-making empires, systems of fragmented sovereignty and national states. Drawing on the contributions of Barrington Moore, Stein Rokkan and Lewis Mumford, Tilly puts to rest the conception of European state development as a single, unilinear process and, in so doing, places relations among states at the center of the analysis of the process of state formation.
Customer Reviews:
Good Overview of European State Formation.......2003-01-03
Charles Tilly is obviously taking on a big topic. In this book, he covers 1000 years of state formation in Europe. His primary interest is to determine why states have converged from divergent state forms (city states, federations, and empires) to a single form (the national state). What I enjoyed about this book is that, unlike so many theories of international politics, it does not take the modern state system for granted but shows that it is the product of a complex historical process. Central to the process is the imperative of the state of extend its influence and to protect itself from rival states. Tilly shows that the growth in the capital intensity and complexity of warfare has led over time to a strengthen of the state and an expansion of its role. This is a plausible theory which has much to commend it. I would have liked to have seen two more issues addressed in the book ...
1) What role did class struggle have in the formation of states?
This concerned is hinted at but not explored. If wars have
become increasingly expensive how have states been able to
impose the high cost of war on their citizens? Does this not
also mean increased exploitation and intensified struggle?
2) How have nuclear weapons effected the long term viability of
national states?
A difficult but highly rewarding read.......2002-02-27
In these days of historical specialization, a comprehensive treatment of any subject is most welcome, whatever its faults. Tilly has indeed set himself a daunting task, namely to explain the development of state formation in Europe over the last millennium; specifically, he seeks to explain why a pattern of divergent state formations ultimately converged in the form of the modern nation-state. To the chagrin of social scientists, he assumes that war has always been the central object of the state; economic/political determinism is complementary but subordinate. Given that the nation-state has enjoyed the greatest military success throughout the centuries, all states have been forced either to move in that direction or cease to exist.
Tilly makes many good points. He reminds us that rulers did not operate with a specific plan of state formation in mind--they created states only in conjunction with certain of their subjects. Given geographic and temporal circumstances, rulers could only pursue increasingly costly military ventures by bargaining with power blocks within their subject population for the necessary resources--soldiers, rations, etc. Where capital was not accumulated and concentrated, the balance of power lay with landowners. Where a city had emerged with a concentration of capital, proto-capitalists held power. Where capital was unavailable, the ruler could resort to methods of coercion of his subjects. Political and economic conditions dictated the bargaining terms with which the ruler sought to win support for his military goals. Tilly argues that different combinations of coercion and capital created diverse types of states. As the demands of war increased, the power blocks which rulers depended on gained more and more advantage over them, thus winning for themselves concessions that increased their standing in the state's government. In effect, the era of bureaucratization was born. The means of capitalization and coercion were incorporated into the structure of the state, and thus was born the nation-state. Essentially, the nation-state has proven to be the best at mobilizing and fighting wars, leading lesser states to either emulate it or risk being conquered by it.
Tilly offers a somewhat simplistic argument, acknowledging the criticisms he duly expects will come. State formation is portrayed as little more than an afterthought of warmongering. The accumulation of royal concessions in time laid the foundation for permanent infrastructure. By seeking revenues and compliance from a subject population, rulers eventually found themselves having to provide for their subjects' welfare--via production, distribution, transportation, etc. In the most modern states, social spending now outweighs military spending; this has served to shorten the length of wars while greatly increasing their intensity. A major contribution of this book is its implication that social history by itself does not explain the emergence of modern states and societies. Some will find Tilly's simplistic model untenable, but I find it quite logical and compelling. His argument (and the wealth of resources on which he draws) certainly warrants serious thought on the part of the reader.
Book Description
Volume II of The Oxford History of the British Empire examines the history of British worldwide expansion from the Glorious Revolution of 1689 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a crucial phase in the creation of the modern British Empire. This is the age of General Wolfe, Clive of India, and Captain Cook. An international team of experts deploy the latest scholarly research to trace and analyze development and expansion over more than a century. They show how trade, warfare, and migration created an Empire, at first overwhelmingly in the Americas but later increasingly in Asia. Although the Empire was ruptured by the American Revolution, it survived and grew into the British Empire that was to dominate the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Series Blurb The Oxford History of the British Empire is a major new assessment of the Empire in the light of recent scholarship and the progressive opening of historical records. From the founding of colonies in North America and the West Indies in the seventeenth century to the reversion of Hong Kong to China at the end of the twentieth, British imperialism was a catalyst for far-reaching change. The Oxford History of the British Empire as a comprehensive study allows us to understand the end of Empire in relation to its beginnings, the meaning of British imperialism for the ruled as well as the rulers, and the significance of the British Empire as a theme in world history.
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Industrial Reorganization and Government Policy in Interwar Britain (Modern Economic and Social History)
Julian Greaves
Manufacturer: Ashgate Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0754603555 |
Book Description
How did the fact become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge? How did description come to seem separable from theory in the precursors of economics and the social sciences?
Mary Poovey explores these questions in A History of the Modern Fact, ranging across an astonishing array of texts and ideas from the publication of the first British manual on double-entry bookkeeping in 1588 to the institutionalization of statistics in the 1830s. She shows how the production of systematic knowledge from descriptions of observed particulars influenced government, how numerical representation became the privileged vehicle for generating useful facts, and how belief—whether figured as credit, credibility, or credulity—remained essential to the production of knowledge.
Illuminating the epistemological conditions that have made modern social and economic knowledge possible, A History of the Modern Fact provides important contributions to the history of political thought, economics, science, and philosophy, as well as to literary and cultural criticism.
Book Description
"It is the standard work on British Imperialism and may remain so for the foreseeable future"-R.D. Long, Choice (on the first edition)
- Brilliantly written and authoritative analysis, provocative and engaging.
- Acknowledged by reviewers as the definitive account of British Imperialism, this trade edition, combines and updates the two individual first edition volumes.
- Explores and defines "gentlemanly capitalism", a phrase coined here by Cain & Hopkins, and includes a new introduction and conclusion and has widened in scope to include globalization.
A milestone in the understanding of British history and imperialism, and truly global in its reach, this account received accolades from reviewers in its first edition. The first to coin the phrase "gentlemanly capitalism", Cain and Hopkins make the strong and provocative argument that it is impossible to understand the nature and evolution of British imperialism without taking account of the peculiarities of her economic development. In particular, the growth of the financial sector - and above all, the City of London - played a crucial role in shaping the course of British history and Britain's relations overseas. Now with a substantive new introduction and a conclusion, the scope of the original account has been widened to include an innovative discussion of globalization.
Peter Cain Sheffield Hallam University.
Tony Hopkins University of Cambridge.
Customer Reviews:
An excellent look at the theoretical construct of the British empire through historical analysis.......2007-10-12
This book serves as an overview of the historiography of the British Empire. It is not a history of the empire by any stretch and really looks at the motives for expansion and shows what other historians are debating on the subject. There is a distinct justification of Marxism throughout the book although they treat it relatively fairly and do point out when Marxist theory does not apply such as Africa. The book does expose the theory that a gentleman class of capitalists was in charge of British expansion and was well placed within the government and financial sectors to control expansion during this time period. Hughes and Cain try to show how this class rose to prominence and then fell with the rest of the empire in the post world war II era through the sterling zone. The majority of the book focuses on the years from 1688-1939. There is only really one chapter on the post 1939 world although what is said about it is very interesting.
Overall this is not a book that you want to start with if you are just learning about British Empire. I would recommend either Dennis Judd's book on Empire or the Oxford history five volume history of the British Empire. Once you have a good grasp on the history of the British Empire this is an excellent book to summarize that knowledge and understand the historical debates affecting the historiography of empire today. The authors are truly the top in their field when considering the theories of empire and this book is a landmark not only in the study of the British empire but empires as a whole.
Cain & Hopkins' epochal work on British imperialism.......2007-01-22
Great historians of British imperialism have tended to come in pairs for the last half-century (Robinson and Gallagher being the other pair), and this is the magnum opus for Cain and Hopkins. In many ways this book is an historiographical response to Robinson and Gallagher, and it is rich in themes adapted both from Robinson and Gallagher, as well as from earlier imperial commentators such as Marx, Hobson, and Lenin.
It argues, amongst other things, that the primary motivator of British overseas expansion were the "gentlemanly interests" emanating from the metropole. That is, interests in the financial and the service sector, non-working incomes that were the natural extension of the British aristocracy of yesteryear. Robinson and Gallagher's ideas may hold true in many cases, but this work is indispensable for demonstrating that perhaps underlying all the strategic interests were economic interests of the most powerful variety - aristocratic businessmen that held sway at Westminster. The connections between gentlemanly capitalists and government officials ran deep, they argue; everything from their common public school upbringing, to powerful amalgamations of finance and government.
This book also includes a detailed discussion of informal empire, yet it considerably modifies Robinson and Gallagher's thesis by ascribing both formal and informal imperialism to the interests of the City (that is, financial and service sector interests). In other words, both formal and informal empire found their impetus in the City's financial interests. This otherwise Hobsonian (J.A. Hobson, "Imperialism: A Study") thesis therefore modifies the economically-based theories of both Hobson himself, as well as Marxist historians, by emphasizing financial and service sector interests, rather than being preoccupied with industrial interests. Industrial interests, according to Cain and Hopkins, were not connected with London policy-makers, and were not sufficiently wealthy and integrated to have any considerable effect on official policy.
First published in 1993, and having been re-issued in one volume in 2001, this book has sparked fresh debate on British imperialism, as well as shed light on the issue of globalization in the twenty-first century.
Book Description
Volume III of The Oxford History of the British Empire covers the long nineteenth century, from the achievement of American independence in the 1780s to the eve of world war in 1914. This was the period of Britain's greatest expansion as both empire-builder and dominant world power. The volume is divided into two parts. The first contains thematic chapters, some focusing on Britain, others on areas at the imperial periphery, exploring those fundamental dynamics of British expansion which made imperial influence and rule possible. They also examine the economic, cultural, and institutional frameworks which gave shape to Britain's overseas empire. Part 2 is devoted to the principal areas of imperial activity overseas, including both white settler and tropical colonies. Chapters examine how British interests and imperial rule shaped individual regions' nineteenth-century political and social-economic history. Themes dealt with include the economics of empire, imperial institutions, defence, technology, imperial and colonial cultures, science and exploration. Attention is given not only to the formal empire, from Australasia and the West Indies to India and the African colonies, but also to China and Latin America, often regarded as central components of a British `informal empire'. Series Blurb The Oxford History of the British Empire is a major new assessment of the Empire in the light of recent scholarship and the progressive opening of historical records. From the founding of colonies in North America and the West Indies in the seventeenth century to the reversion of Hong Kong to China at the end of the twentieth, British imperialism was a catalyst for far-reaching change. The Oxford History of the British Empire as a comprehensive study allows us to understand the end of Empire in relation to its beginnings, the meaning of British imperialism for the ruled as well as the rulers, and the significance of the British Empire as a theme in world history
Book Description
Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the eighteenth century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities,and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new wants. This unparalleled 'product revolution' provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a 'new luxury', one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain is cultural history at its best, built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. Maxine Berg traces how this new consumer society of the eighteenth century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialization itself. Global markets for the consumer goods of private and domestic life inspired the industrial revolution and British products 'won the world'.
Customer Reviews:
Useful.......2006-08-12
I read this book for a research paper on the Industrial Revolution. It is clearly written and does not try to intimidate readers with overly complicated prose that distract from the main arguments. It is repetitive at times, but overall moves along nicely. For anyone wishing to explore the role of consumerism and consumption in shaping the Industrial Revolution and British society, I would urge you to read this book. It certainly made me reconsider the function of shopping.
Books:
- The Lean Manufacturing Pocket Handbook
- The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
- The Rose and the Shield
- The Science of Getting Rich
- The Six Sigma Handbook: The Complete Guide for Greenbelts, Blackbelts, and Managers at All Levels, Revised and Expanded Edition
- The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge Studies in Social & Cultural Anthropology)
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
- The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
- Theogony, Works and Days (Oxford World's Classics)
- Thomas the Tank Engine: The Complete Collection (Railway Series)
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- History: Fiction or Science
- Yoga for Pregnancy: Ninety-Two Safe, Gentle Stretches Appropriate for Pregnant Women & New Mothe
- Sakharov: The Screenplay
- Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994
- The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm
- Warriors Field Guide: Secrets of the Clans
- The Game and the Glory
- Implementing Management Innovations: Lessons Learned from Activity Based Costing in the U.S. Automob
- Source Book On Collective Bargaining: Wages Benefits, And Other Contract Issues 2004
- The Dragon King's Palace: A Novel
The First Industrial Revolution
The Birth of Industrial Britain: Social Change, 1750-1850 (Seminar Studies in History Series)
The Industrial Revolution and British Society
The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain
The Industrial Revolution in World History
