Product Description: This edited collection, first published in 1991, focuses on the commercial relations, marketing structures and development of consumption that accompanied early industrial expansion. The papers examine aspects of industrial structure and work organisation, including women’s work, and highlight the conflict and compromise between work traditions and the emergence of a market culture...read more

Luxury was the keyword of the Eighteenth century, and the history of luxury links diverse topics of enquiry such as material culture, taste, civility and sensibility, literature and art. This book explores the political, economic, moral and intellectual effects of the production and consumption of luxury goods.

Product Description: Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes...read more

Product Description: The internal organisation of production before the development of the factory system is still shrouded in historical mystery. How goods were made before machines, how work was organised before the factory system, how artisans and labourers perceived and lived their work are questions to which we have only hesitant and tentative answers...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: From tulips to jewels, gastronomy to silver, coffee to colors, the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century saw an explosion of consumer and luxury objects and a growing demand for their consumption by a widening section of the population...read more

Product Description: This major new book contains contributions by many of the leading historians of technology. The contributors argue that culture, institutions and learning either made the way for, or blocked technological and industrial transformation...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This new edition of The Age of Manufactures provides an exciting alternative overview of the eighteenth-century British economy. Recent macro-economic history has discounted many of the achievements of the Industrial Revolution. Maxine Berg argues that at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, we find many new consumer industries employing a women's workforce, and bringing with them a rich diversity of technological and organizational change...read more

Product Description: This new edition of The Age of Manufactures provides an exciting alternative overview of the eighteenth-century British economy. Recent macro-economic history has discounted many of the achievements of the Industrial Revolution. Maxine Berg argues that at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, we find many new consumer industries employing a women's workforce, and bringing with them a rich diversity of technological and organizational change...read more

Product Description: This fascinating overview of the neglected 18th-century British economy offers a fresh perspective of 'the other Industrial Revolution.' Dr. Berg traverses the years between the pre-industrial and industrial periods, dissects the phenomena of industrial development now packaged by historians as 'protoindustrialization,' and uncovers the early origins of new technologies, new and widely variable industrial structures, and patterns of work...read more

Product Description: For those who lived through it, Britain's Industrial Revolution was experienced as the Machinery Question. It was far from clear to contemporaries whether the first forms of mechanized factory production heralded an inevitable economic revolution, or were but one course among several which might be modified or eventually rejected altogether, Opinion about the necessity or beneficence of machines was profoundly divided at all levels of society; the often acrimonious debate that arose reverberated through economic, political, cultural and intellectual life...read more