BiblioVault - Books about Industrial Revolution

Class and Community

The Industrial Revolution in Lynn

Alan Dawley

Harvard University Press, 1976

Class and Community

The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition, with a New Preface

Alan Dawley

Harvard University Press, 2000

In this twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his prize-winning book, Dawley reflects once more on labor and class issues, poverty and progress, and the contours of urban history in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, during the rise of industrialism in the early nineteenth century. He not only revisits this urban conglomeration, but also seeks out previously unheard groups such as women and blacks. The result is a more rounded portrait of a small eastern city on the verge of becoming modern.

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Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis

The Industrial Revolution to the Present

Tatiana Konrad

University of Nevada Press, 2024

Concentrating on a powerful, emerging genre, Tatiana Konrad’s Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis provides a survey of popular narratives that further our understanding of climate change in contemporary fiction. Konrad advocates for the expansion and redefinition of the cli-fi genre and argues that industrial fiction from the nineteenth century is the first example of climate change fiction. Tracing the ways through which cli-fi outlines a history of our modern ecocultural crisis, this book demonstrates how the genre employs four major thematic clusters to achieve this narrative: weather, science, religion, and place.

Focusing on a diverse range of issues, including fossil fuels, cheap energy, the intricacies of human–more-than-human relationships, and postcolonial geographies, Konrad illustrates how cli-fi transcends mere storytelling. The genre ultimately emerges as an important means to forecast, imagine, and contemplate climatic events.

The book invites a broadening of the environmental humanities discourse, asking readers not only to deepen their understanding of the current climate crisis, but also to consider how cli-fi culture can be viewed as an effective method to address climate change.

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England's Great Transformation

Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution

Marc W. Steinberg

University of Chicago Press, 2016

With England’s Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi’s landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labor contracts, centered on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line.

Building his argument on three case studies—the Hanley pottery industry, Hull fisheries, and Redditch needlemakers—Steinberg employs both local and national analyses to emphasize the ways in which these master-servant laws allowed employers to use the criminal prosecutions of workers to maintain control of their labor force. Steinberg provides a fresh perspective on the dynamics of labor control and class power, integrating the complex pathways of Marxism, historical institutionalism, and feminism, and giving readers a subtle yet revelatory new understanding of workplace control and power during England’s Industrial Revolution.

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Favorites of Fortune

Technology, Growth, and Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution

Patrice Higonnet

Harvard University Press, 1991

A galaxy of distinguished international economists and historians pit economic history against the shaky assumptions of the classical economic theory of natural growth. Their explanations consider the factors of technology, entrepreneurialism, and paths to economic growth, but each reflects an ideological wave of explanation that has marked the last two hundred years.

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The Genesis of Modern Management

A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain

Sidney Pollard

Harvard University Press

The History of Inequality

From the Industrial Revolution to the Present

Daniel Waldenström and Jesper Roine

Harvard University Press

Networks of Improvement

Literature, Bodies, and Machines in the Industrial Revolution

Jon Mee

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A new literary-cultural history of the Industrial Revolution in Britain from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.

Working against the stubbornly persistent image of “dark satanic mills,” in many ways so characteristic of literary Romanticism, Jon Mee provides a fresh, revisionary account of the Industrial Revolution as a story of unintended consequences. In Networks of Improvement, Mee reads a wide range of texts—economic, medical, and more conventionally “literary”—with a focus on their circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britain’s emerging manufacturing towns led to unexpectedly coercive forms of machine productivity, a pattern that might be seen repeating in the digital technologies of our own time. Instead of treating the Industrial Revolution as Romanticism’s “other,” Mee shows how writing, practices, and institutions emanating from these industrial towns developed a new kind of knowledge economy, one where local literary and philosophical societies served as important transmission hubs for the circulation of knowledge.

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Voices of the Industrial Revolution

Selected Readings from the Liberal Economists and Their Critics

John Bowditch and Clement Ramsland, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1961

Studies social and economic issues through the writings of great thinkers of the age

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