From Craftsmen to Capitalists
From Craftsmen to Capitalists

Author: Frederick L. McKitrick

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2016-09-01

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 178533249X

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Politically adrift, alienated from Weimar society, and fearful of competition from industrial elites and the working class alike, the independent artisans of interwar Germany were a particularly receptive audience for National Socialist ideology. As Hitler consolidated power, they emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party’s rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, in the years after 1945, the artisan class became one of the pillars of postwar stability, thoroughly integrated into German society. From Craftsmen to Capitalists gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how skilled tradesmen recast their historical traditions and forged alliances with former antagonists to help realize German democratization and recovery.

Creating Modern Capitalism
Creating Modern Capitalism

Author: Thomas K. McCraw

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1998-01-02

Total Pages: 760

ISBN-13: 0674256204

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What explains the national economic success of the United States, Britain, Germany, and Japan? What can be learned from the long-term championship performances of leading business firms in each country? How important were specific innovations by individual entrepreneurs? And in the end, what is the true nature of capitalist development?The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Thomas K. McCraw and his coauthors present penetrating answers to these questions. Creating Modern Capitalism is the first book to explain for a broad audience the interconnections among technological innovation, management science, the power of entrepreneurship, and national economic growth. The authors approach each question from a comparative framework and with a unique triple focus on national economic systems, particular companies, and individual business leaders.Above all, the book focuses on how specific entrepreneurs influenced the economic success of their countries: Josiah Wedgwood and Henry Royce in Britain; August Thyssen and Georg von Siemens in Germany; Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, and the two Thomas J. Watsons in the United States; Sakichi Toyoda, Masatoshi Ito, and Toshifumi Suzuki in Japan.The product of a three-year collaborative effort at the Harvard Business School, the book combines cutting-edge scholarship with a finely tuned sense of the art of management. It will engage general readers as well as those with a special interest in entrepreneurship and the evolution of national business systems.

Hometown Hamburg
Hometown Hamburg

Author: Frank Domurad

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2019-03-22

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 1783089326

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Through the study of Hamburg handicraft in the late Weimar Republic "Hometown Hamburg" addresses three intertwined problems in modern German history: the role of institutionalized social, political and cultural continuity versus contingency in the course of modern German development; the impact of conflicting notions of social order on the survival of liberal democracy; and the role of corporate politics in the rise of National Socialism. It provides a theoretical and analytical framework for reintroducing the notion of historical continuity in the study of modern German history. The book also supports the recent challenges to the notion of Hamburg as a liberal economic and political bastion, a “London on the Elbe,” in a nation of conservative and authoritarian governmental regimes. Hometown Hamburg demonstrates why “liberal” and “socialist” Hamburg also remained a hotbed of corporate radicalism and underscores the fact that National Socialism was the only political party that presented a coherent vision of a corporate “good society,” thereby making it attractive to hometown voters across the entire social spectrum in Hamburg (and in Germany).

Different Germans, Many Germanies
Different Germans, Many Germanies

Author: Konrad H. Jarausch

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 178533431X

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As much as any other nation, Germany has long been understood in terms of totalizing narratives. For Anglo-American observers in particular, the legacies of two world wars still powerfully define twentieth-century German history, whether through the lens of Nazi-era militarism and racial hatred or the nation’s emergence as a “model” postwar industrial democracy. This volume transcends such common categories, bringing together transatlantic studies that are unburdened by the ideological and methodological constraints of previous generations of scholarship. From American perceptions of the Kaiserreich to the challenges posed by a multicultural Europe, it argues for—and exemplifies—an approach to German Studies that is nuanced, self-reflective, and holistic.

Unnecessary Suffering
Unnecessary Suffering

Author: Maurice Glasman

Publisher: Verso

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9781859849767

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They have a dream - a dream of a world where everything and everybody can be bought and sold, a world run efficiently by managers, a world where 'freedom' means the free market. Maurice Glasman argues that this dream is an unrealisable utopia - or a nightmare if put into practice. He takes the management-speak cliches of the New Right, and New Labour alike and turns them on their head: managers are not efficient, they are a barrier to work and production; 'liberal democracy' - which now means the free market and the strong state - should be turned upside down, with democracy at the level of the economy and liberalism at the level of the state. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi, Glasman argues that there is no need to surrender solidarity and human rights to the march of the managers and the market. There is another tradition, represented by the labour movement and the Catholic church in West Germany, which defended democracy in the workplace and reined back the savageries of capitalism. It was the tradition that Solidarity in Poland could have looked to after 1989, instead of allowing itself to be hijacked by the New Right and statist communitarianism. Unnecessary Suffering examines this tradition and issues a call that cries out that human beings and the environment cannot, should not, and will not be treated as commodities.

Approaches to Global History
Approaches to Global History

Author: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 147428860X

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This volume brings together 25 defining texts in global history. These pieces cover approaches to the subject from antiquity to the present century and, taken together, show the development of the discipline, providing a solid historiographical, theoretical and methodological overview that will be invaluable for students. The collection gives a unique sense of how, at different times, in different cultural circumstances, students of the past have approached the problems of encompassing the world in a single narrative or theory. This is a reader with an implicit story to unfold. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tracks how a global understanding of history originated in prophetic writings, how the “Renaissance discovery of the world” multiplied the opportunities for historians to think about history globally, how scientific investigations of change came to exert influence and inspire new thinking among global historians, how “culture wars” ensued between advocates of scientistic and culturalist models and how changing contexts in the 20th century produced new thematic approaches to the world as a whole. Each part is introduced, setting it in context and explaining the impact of its subject matter on the discipline, as well as the relations between the texts and their place in the overall development of global history.

The Battle of the Styles
The Battle of the Styles

Author: Bernard Porter

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2011-03-17

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1441168729

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This title explores the controversy surrounding the design of the new Foreign Office in London during Britain's Imperial heyday. In 1855 it was decided to build a new block of government offices in London, starting with the Foreign and War Offices. The government offices competition came at what was probably - looking back on it - the zenith of Britain's confidence as a nation and international power. One would expect the mid-Victorians to have felt, firstly, pride in their current national situation; and secondly, the urge to commemorate this in the most important national building to be projected in twenty years. Porter uses the debates surrounding the building of these important new monuments to interrogate the very fabric of British society, culture and nation building. The discussion on so many issues - religion, nationality, empire, history, modernism, truth, morality, gender - quite apart from considerations of 'pure' aesthetics, offers an unusual, perhaps even unique, insight into the relationship between these matters and the 'culture' of the time.