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Considerable attention has recently been focused on the importance of social networks and business culture in reducing transaction costs, both in the pre-industrial period and during the nineteenth century. This book brings together twelve original contributions by scholars in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and North America which represent important and innovative research on this topic. They cover two broad themes. First, the role of business culture in determining commercial success, in particular the importance of familial, religious, ethnic and associational connections in the working lives of merchants and the impact of business practices on family life. Second, the wider inst...
Argues that the Jews who flocked to the United States during the age of mass migration were aided appreciably by their association with a particular corner of the American economy: the rag trade. Comparing the history of Jewish participation within the clothing trade in the United States with that of Jews in the same business in England, Mendelsohn demonstrates that differences within the garment industry on either side of the Atlantic contributed to a very real divergence in social and economic outcomes for Jews in each setting. --From publisher description.
This work provides a sweeping history of enterprise in Mesopotamia and Neo-Babylon; carries the reader through the Islamic Middle East; offers insights into the entrepreneurial history of China, Japan, and colonial India; and describes the crucial role of the entrepreneur in innovation activity in the Western world.
This book details a significant and largely untold history of the demand for cheap, fashionable clothing for young working-class women. This is an interdisciplinary fashion and business history analysis that investigates the design, manufacture, retailing and consumption of fashion for and by young working-class women in 1930s Britain. It concentrates on new mass developments in the design and manufacture of lightweight day dresses styled for younger women, and on their retailing in the second-hand trade and seconds dealing, street markets, new multiple stores, department stores, independent dress shops and home dressmaking. The book also discusses the specific impact of this new product within the emerging mass manufactured goods mail order catalogue industry in England. These outlets all offered venues of consumption to the young, employed, modern working-class woman, and are analysed in the context of old and new businesses practices. The actuality of the garments worn by these young women is paramount to this research and will be at the forefront of all findings and outcomes.
Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises—climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes—means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure...
In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, show...
James Joyce's Leopold Bloom--the atheistic Everyman of Ulysses, son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother--may have turned the world's literary eyes on Dublin, but those who look to him for history should think again. He could hardly have been a product of the city's bona fide Jewish community, where intermarriage with outsiders was rare and piety was pronounced. In Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, a leading economic historian tells the real story of how Jewish Ireland--and Dublin's Little Jerusalem in particular--made ends meet from the 1870s, when the first Lithuanian Jewish immigrants landed in Dublin, to the late 1940s, just before the community began its dramati...
At which moments and in which ways did Jews play a central role in the development of American capitalism? Many popular writers address the intersection of Jews and capitalism, but few scholars, perhaps fearing this question’s anti-Semitic overtones, have pondered it openly. Chosen Capital represents the first historical collection devoted to this question in its analysis of the ways in which Jews in North America shaped and were shaped by America’s particular system of capitalism. Jews fundamentally molded aspects of the economy during the century when American capital was being redefined by industrialization, war, migration, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower. Surve...
The Americanization of Europe and the strategic initiatives of American firms abroad have been well studied. The expansion of American firms in Europe, however, lacked a comprehensive study. This book gathers the works of two dozen economic and business historians from across Europe, preceded by Mira Wilkins' comparative essay. The collection addresses the timetable and pace of American direct investment in Europe, the patterns followed in each country according to the specificities of each industry and service sector, and the strategies followed by the different firms. The studies go beyond the facts, scrutinizing the immaterial aspects of this business history, especially European perceptions of American firms and the essential stakes of corporate images and identities. The Europeanization of American firms is a key issue, including social relations, management, commercial policies, brand image, connections and embeddedness. The authors gauge the reaction of public authorities and lobbies (industrialists and trade unions). Graphs and tables provide data, while overviews of ads published by American affiliates fuel analyses of consumer perception.
'An impressive range of sources... a fascinating, thorough and well produced book. Well Suited's wide scope will appeal to a range of historians - those interested in costume and textiles, gender, Jewish history, economics and business as well as Leeds residents for whom, even if they were not dependent on it, the clothing industry provided a backdrop to everyday life for much of the twentieth century.' -Costume Society'This is a tale of one city, a comprehensive account of an industry extraordinarily important to the economy of Leeds for over a century. But while the book focuses on this national centre of clothing manufacture, the issues considered are anything but parochial.' -Costume Soc...