The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry
The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry

Author: John Rule

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-18

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1040112331

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Originally published in 1981, this book, unlike conventional textbooks concerning the Industrial Revolution, stresses the continuity of the labour experience in the 18th Century. Examining the organisation and structure of mining and manufacture in England, the author identifies the main kinds of workers: artisans, miners, journeymen and home-based outworkers. The book goes on to illustrate how the pattern of recrimination and counter-recrimination was a condition of the employer-worker relationship in traditional industries and argues that the values of these workers were the main determinants of the attitudes, expectations, responses and actions that took place in English manufacturing. Covering such important, but frequently neglected, areas of 18th Century industry as health, apprenticeship and industrial crime, this study concludes by questioning whether a distinctive industrial culture existed during the period and how far a class consciousness can be regarded as having emerged.

The Great Cat Massacre
The Great Cat Massacre

Author: Robert Darnton

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2009-05-12

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0465010482

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The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions the distinguished Harvard historian Robert Darnton answers The Great Cat Massacre, a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment." A classic of European history, it is an essential starting point for understanding Enlightenment France.

New Directions in Economic and Social History
New Directions in Economic and Social History

Author: Anne Digby

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 9780333495698

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This is a collection of essays on the subjects of agriculture, economy, society and labour, covering major events in British social history and the impact of such factors as imperialism and the Industrial Revolution.

Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution
Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution

Author: Jane Humphries

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-06-24

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1139489283

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This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution, first published in 2010. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialisation, 1790–1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanisation and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large subsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together. The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers and schooling. Its images of suffering, stoicism and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.

Empire of Guns
Empire of Guns

Author: Priya Satia

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-04-10

Total Pages: 569

ISBN-13: 0735221871

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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE By a prize-winning young historian, an authoritative work that reframes the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of British empire, and emergence of industrial capitalism by presenting them as inextricable from the gun trade "A fascinating and important glimpse into how violence fueled the industrial revolution, Priya Satia's book stuns with deep scholarship and sparkling prose."--Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, upends this conventional wisdom by placing war and Britain's prosperous gun trade at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the state's imperial expansion. Satia brings to life this bustling industrial society with the story of a scandal: Samuel Galton of Birmingham, one of Britain's most prominent gunmakers, has been condemned by his fellow Quakers, who argue that his profession violates the society's pacifist principles. In his fervent self-defense, Galton argues that the state's heavy reliance on industry for all of its war needs means that every member of the British industrial economy is implicated in Britain's near-constant state of war. Empire of Guns uses the story of Galton and the gun trade, from Birmingham to the outermost edges of the British empire, to illuminate the nation's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the state's role in economic development, and the origins of our era's debates about gun control and the "military-industrial complex" -- that thorny partnership of government, the economy, and the military. Through Satia's eyes, we acquire a radically new understanding of this critical historical moment and all that followed from it. Sweeping in its scope and entirely original in its approach, Empire of Guns is a masterful new work of history -- a rigorous historical argument with a human story at its heart.

The Value of Work since the 18th Century
The Value of Work since the 18th Century

Author: Massimo Asta

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-07-27

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1350332089

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Beginning in the 18th century, a turning point in labour history as work encountered an industrialising modernity, this book explores how different forms of work have been valued up to the present day. Focusing on the cultural, intellectual, social and political implications of wages, the chapters in this collection historicise the labour market, conceiving it as complex system of social relations which evolve through time and differ according to space. They show how the level of wages and other forms of remuneration reflect not only marginal productivity and scarcity but also the nature of work relations and wider political, social and economic circumstances. With examples ranging across several centuries and different parts of the globe, it shows how wages are influenced by the specific organization and processes of work, conflict and power, social status and hierarchies between workers, custom and identity, family structure and professional ethics, ideology, politics and policy. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches The Value of Work since the 18th Century also addresses two interlinked questions; how did theoretical interpretations and techniques of wage measurement emerge and evolve, and to what extent does this matter in understanding the social and political history of work?

Convict Workers
Convict Workers

Author: Stephen Nicholas

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780521361262

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This work offers a new interpretation of Australia's convict past. It is based on a detailed analysis of records of 20,000 male and female convicts - one in three of those transported to New South Wales between 1817 and 1840.