In this magisterial study, Michael Smith explains how France left behind small-scale merchant capitalism for the large corporate enterprises that would eventually dominate its domestic economy and project French influence throughout the world.
Arguing against the long-standing view that French economic and business development was crippled by missed opportunities and entrepreneurial failures, Smith presents a story of considerable achievement. French companies made major contributions to the Second Industrial Revolution of 1880-1930, especially in ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, electrochemicals, industrial gases, and motor vehicles. Rejecting the notion that France took a separate route to economic modernity, Smith argues that it tracked other industrial nations along a path dominated by large-scale production and corporate enterprise. Technological and organizational capabilities acquired by French companies prior to 1930 played a key role in the country's rapid economic recovery after World War II and its broader economic success in the second half of the twentieth century. Smith also addresses the distinctive characteristics of French economic and business development, including the pivotal role of the French state, the pervasive influence of French financiers, and the significance of labor conflict.
This superb account is an invaluable contribution to business history and the history of modern France.
Contributors: Jon Arrizabalaga, Rob Boddice, Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, Emma Hutchison, Dolores Martín-Moruno, Piroska Nagy, Beatriz Pichel, María Rosón, Pilar León-Sanz, Bertrand Taithe, and Gian Marco Vidor.
Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is simultaneously original and reflective of her time and culture. In Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered, one of the most ambitious and rewarding of her numerous narrative works, Marinella demonstrates her skill as an epic poet.
Now available for the first time in English translation, Enrico retells the story of the conquest of Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade (1202–04). Marinella intersperses historical events in her account of the invasion with numerous invented episodes, drawing on the rich imaginative legacy of the chivalric romance. Fast-moving, colorful, and narrated with the zest that characterizes Marinella’s other works, this poem is a great example of a woman engaging critically with a quintessentially masculine form and subject matter, writing in a genre in which the work of women poets was typically shunned.
In European Urbanization Jan de Vries provides the first comprehensive data base for understanding the nature of the changes that took place in European cities from 1500 to 1800. The book is based on an immense systematic survey of the population history of 379 European cities with 10,000 or more inhabitants analyzed at fifty-year intervals.
Using a wide range of economic, demographic, and geographic models, de Vries illustrates patterns of urban growth, draws conclusions about the significance of migratory behavior, and shows the effects of urbanization on the history of Europe as a whole. In presenting these broad measures of urbanization, de Vries makes a case that the cities of Europe gradually came to form a single urban system. The properties of this system are analyzed with the use of several geographical concepts: rank-size distribution, transition matrices, and potential surfaces, among others. This examination of the fortunes of cities of different sizes and regions and the economic and political factors that affected their development is fundamentally important for understanding modern Europe and the contemporary problems of urban development. De Vries mines these rich, complex data to give us a rounded view of the dynamics of change in urban preindustrial society.
European Urbanization will be of great value to readers interested in social, economic, and demographic history, geography, architecture, and urban studies.
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