This comprehensive single-volume source of information on the social and economic transformations in Europe over the past hundred years, fills a critical gap in our knowledge. It examinations population trends, social structures, and economic structures, and offers an integrative overview of changes in both the organization of the economy and the role of the state in economic management.
A major history of economic regimes and economic performance throughout the twentieth century. Ivan T. Berend looks at the historic development of the twentieth-century European economy, examining both its failures and its successes in responding to the challenges of this crisis-ridden and troubled but highly successful age. The book surveys the European economy's chronological development, the main factors of economic growth, and the various economic regimes that were invented and introduced in Europe during the twentieth century. Professor Berend shows how the vast disparity between the European regions that had characterized earlier periods gradually began to disappear during the course of the twentieth century as more and more countries reached a more or less similar level of economic development. This accessible book will be required reading for students in European economic history, economics, and modern European history.
Twentieth-Century Europe: A Brief History presents readers with a concise and accessible survey of the most significant themes and political events that shaped European history in the 20th and 21st centuries. Features updates that include a new chapter that reviews major political and economic trends since 1989 and an extensively revised chapter that emphasizes the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since World War II Organized into brief chapters that are suitable for traditional courses or for classes in non-traditional courses that allow for additional material selected by the professor Includes the addition of a variety of supplemental materials such as chronological timelines, maps, and illustrations
Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History offers a framework for understanding globalization over the past century. Through a detailed analysis of ports, shipping and trading companies whose networks spanned the world, Michael B. Miller shows how a European maritime infrastructure made modern production and consumer societies possible. He argues that the combination of overseas connections and close ties to home ports contributed to globalization. Miller also explains how the ability to manage merchant shipping's complex logistics was central to the outcome of both world wars. He chronicles transformations in hierarchies, culture, identities and port city space, all of which produced a new and different maritime world by the end of the century.
Following a historically chronological approach, and with a clear focus on the marked regional diversity characterising Italy, this volume analyses the impact of social, economic, cultural and political transformation on the lives of Italians. It assesses their living standards, their health and education, their working conditions and their leisure activities. The final part of the book examines contemporary Italian society in the light of the political and moral crisis of the early 1990s.
Challenges of Modernity offers a broad account of the social and economic history of Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century and asks critical questions about the structure and experience of modernity in different contexts and periods. This volume focuses on central questions such as: How did the various aspects of modernity manifest themselves in the region, and what were their limits? How was the multifaceted transition from a mainly agrarian to an industrial and post-industrial society experienced and perceived by historical subjects? Did Central and Eastern Europe in fact approximate its dream of modernity in the twentieth century despite all the reversals, detours and third-way visions? Structured chronologically and taking a comparative approach, a range of international contributors combine a focus on the overarching problems of the region with a discussion of individual countries and societies, offering the reader a comprehensive, nuanced survey of the social and economic history of this complex region in the recent past. The first in a four-volume set on Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, it is the go-to resource for those interested in the ‘challenges of modernity‘ faced by this dynamic region.
The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today. De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it--first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.
This three volume work offers a comprehensive survey of the history of economic activity and economic change in the United States, and in those regions whose economies have at certain times been closely allied to that of the US.
