Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness PDF Download

Author: Craig Muldrew
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139495127
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Until the widespread harnessing of machine energy, food was the energy which fuelled the economy. In this groundbreaking 2011 study of agricultural labourers' diet and material standard of living, Craig Muldrew uses empirical research to present a much fuller account of the interrelationship between consumption, living standards and work in the early modern English economy than has previously existed. The book integrates labourers into a study of the wider economy and engages with the history of food as an energy source and its importance to working life, the social complexity of family earnings, and the concept of the 'industrious revolution'. It argues that 'industriousness' was as much the result of ideology and labour markets as labourers' household consumption. Linking this with ideas about the social order of early modern England, the author demonstrates that bread, beer and meat were the petrol of this world, and a springboard for economic change.

Author: Adam Arvidsson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509538917
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
This book argues that, as industrial capitalism enters a period of prolonged crisis, a new paradigm of ‘industrious modernity’ is emerging. Based on small-scale, commons-based and market-oriented entrepreneurship, this industrious modernity is being pioneered by the many outcasts that no longer find a place within a crumbling industrial modernity. This new industriousness draws on the new planetary commons that have been generated by the globalization of industrial capitalism itself. The outsourcing of material production to global supply chains has made the skills necessary to engage in commodity production generic and common, and the globalization of media culture and the internet have generated new knowledge commons. Together these new commons have radically reduced the capital requirements to engage in economic activity, and are providing new, highly efficient tools of productive organization at little cost. This timely analysis of the new forces of change in our societies today will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the impact of digital technologies and the future of capitalism.

Author: Akira Hayami
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 4431551425
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
This book explains in fascinating detail how economic and social transformations in pre-1600 Japan led to an industrious revolution in the early modern period and how the fruits of the Industrious Revolution are what have supported Japan since the eighteenth century, improving living standards and leading to the formation of the work ethic of modern Japan. The arrival of the Sengoku Period in the sixteenth century saw the emergence and domination of government by the warrior class. It was Tokugawa Ieyasu who unified the realm. Yet this unity did not give rise to an autocratic state, as the shogun was recognized merely as a main pillar of the warrior class. Economically, however, from the fourteenth century, currency payments for shōen nengu (taxes paid to the proprietor) became standard, and currency circulation began, primarily in the central region. Under Tokugawa rule, organized domestic coinage of currency began, opening the way to establishing a national economic society. Also, agricultural land was surveyed through cadastral surveys known as kenchi. Land values were converted in terms of rice, so the expected rice yields for each village were assessed, and the lords used this as a benchmark for imposing taxes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Japan experienced a “great transition,” and conditions for peasants, agriculture, and farming villages underwent great changes. Inefficient traditional agriculture using peasants in a state of servitude was transformed into highly efficient small-sized farming operations which relied on family labor. As production yields increased due to labor-intensive agriculture, the profits obtained by the peasants improved their living standards. The stem-family system became the norm through which work ethics and even literacy were transmitted. This very change was the result of the “industrious revolution” in Japan. The book thus presents the framework of the facts of pre-industrial Japanese history and depicts pre-modern Japan from a macroscopic point of view, showing how the industrious revolution came about. It is certain to be of great interest to economists and historians alike.

Author: Sharon Braslaw Sundue
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Industrious in Their Stations is the first comparative study of child labor in eighteenth-century America. Focusing on Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston, Sundue examines the work experiences of children and analyzes regional differences in child labor according to gender, race, and class. During the eighteenth century, work was central to the lives of most young people. Work skills, learned young, were regarded as the crux of a useful education, heralded as a preventative against idleness and sin, and as representing a vital contribution to the economy. By century's end, however, the "diffusion of knowledge" to all white citizens was being described by many political thinkers as critical to securing the new republic, and more formal education had gained popularity. But this expansion of schooling opportunities did not affect all groups of children equally. Sundue argues that controlling access to education, both academic and vocational, was an essential mechanism for controlling the potentially unruly poor. By comparing regional elite efforts to afford the young poor both vocational and formal academic education, Sundue offers a nuanced, complicated picture of how inequality was constructed both prior to and after the American Revolution, highlighting its disparate impact on class, race, and gender in late eighteenth-century America

Author: J. Sears McGee
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804794286
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
This is the first biography of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, a member of England's Long Parliament, Puritan, historian and antiquarian who lived from 1602–1650. D'Ewes took the Puritan side against the supporters of King Charles I in the English Civil War, and his extensive journal of the Long Parliament, together with his autobiography and correspondence, offer a uniquely comprehensive view of the life of a seventeenth-century English gentleman, his opinions, thoughts and prejudices during this tumultuous time. D'Ewes left the most extensive archive of personal papers of any individual in early modern Europe. His life and thought before the Long Parliament are carefully analyzed, so that the mind of one of the Parliamentarian opponents of King Charles I's policies can be understood more fully than that of any other Member of Parliament. Although conservative in social and political terms, D'Ewes's Puritanism prevented him from joining his Royalist younger brother Richard during the civil war that began in 1642. D'Ewes collected one of the largest private libraries of books and manuscripts in England in his era and used them to pursue historical and antiquarian research. He followed news of national and international events voraciously and conveyed his opinions of them to his friends in many hundreds of letters. McGee's biography is the first thorough exploration of the life and ideas of this extraordinary observer, offering fresh insight into this pivotal time in European history.

Author: Michael McCloskey
Publisher: Michael McCloskey
ISBN: 0615457231
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
The People's Republic of China dominates half the globe, balanced only by the combined power of the decaying Western world. As main players in a new age of expansion, the Chinese reach outward to establish many stations throughout the solar system.Sun Xinmei is a bold and devious young graduate of Tsinghua University in Beijing who becomes intimately embroiled in the system wide slave trade as an agent of the Ministry of State Security.Li Feng is a brave young man destined to serve as an officer in the Divine Space Force of the PRC. As such he's trained to lead robotic weapons as much as the men who follow them into battle.Promised to each other, Xinmei and Feng hope to lead successful careers and someday cross paths again to share prosperous lives.Though space itself proves to be a harsh frontier, they discover that the greatest obstacles to their plans are the inhabitants of the space stations that dot the solar system.

Author: Hiromi Hosoya
Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers
ISBN: 9783037786147
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
How can industrial production be reintegrated into the urban fabric in a post-digital world Research from Harvard's Graduate School of Design addresses the issues Cities have always been places where commerce and production, working and living, are physically and functionally integrated. Only with the rise of industry have zoning regulations been introduced to separate these functions. But what role do these regulations play when industry is digitized, increasingly emission-free and shifting away from mass production What will the ideal mix of working and living be in the future In a world characterized by digital disruption, migration and demographic shifts, how do we build cities based on social equity and resilience Based on interdisciplinary urban design research undertaken at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, the Zurich-based architecture studio Hosoya Schaefer presents The Industrious City: Urban Industry in the Digital Age. Investigating how production can be reintroduced into the urban fabric, this book explores how production, services, leisure and living might come together in a future integrated city.

Author: Mary Nejedly
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
ISBN: 1912260476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Studies of child labour have examined the experiences of child workers in agriculture, mining and textile mills, yet surprisingly little research has focused on child labour in manufacturing towns. This book investigates the extent and nature of child labour in Birmingham and the West Midlands, from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. It considers the economic contributions of child workers under the age of 14 and the impact of early work on their health and education. Child labour in the region was not a short-lived stage of the early Industrial Revolution but an integral part of industry throughout the nineteenth century. Parents regarded their children as potentially valuable contributors to the family economy, encouraging families to migrate from rural areas so that their children could work from an early age in the manufacture of pins, nails, buttons, glass, locks and guns as well as tin-plating, carpet-weaving, brass-casting and other industries. The demand for young workers in Birmingham was greater than that for adults; in Mary Nejedly's detailed analysis the importance of children's earnings to the family economy becomes clear, as well as the role played by child workers in industrialisation itself. In view of the economic benefit of children's labour to families as well as employers, both children's education and health could and did suffer.As well as working at harmful processes that produced dangerous fumes and dust or exposed them to poisonous substances, children also suffered injuries in the workplace, mainly to the head, eyes and fingers, and were often subjected to ill-treatment from adult workers. The wide gulf in economic circumstances that existed between the families of skilled workers and those of unskilled workers, unemployed workers or single-parent families also becomes evident.Attitudes towards childhood changed over the course of the period, however, with a greater emphasis being placed on the role of education for all children as a means of reducing pauperism and dependence on the poor rate. Concerns about health also gradually emerged, together with laws to limit work for children both by age and hours worked. Mary Nejedly's clear-eyed research sheds fresh light on the life of working children and increases our knowledge of an important aspect of social and economic history.

Author: Jan de Vries
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521719254
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This 2008 book traces the evolution of an 'industrious revolution' that fundamentally altered the material cultures of Europe and North America.

Author: Peter-Paul Banziger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315522764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Global issues such as climate change and the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis have spurred interest in thinking about the history of the modern economy that goes beyond disciplinary economic history. This book contributes to the cultural history of capitalism and its different regimes of productivity by pursuing the perspective of body history and by providing a global scope. Throughout modernity, the body served as a fundamental, albeit essentially changing, linchpin for both the organization of economic practices and for intellectual reflections on the economy. In particular, it was the pivotal interface to render notions of economic productivity intelligible. The book explores this central thesis in a range of case studies, drawing on source material from West Africa, Europe, Mexico, and the US. Framed by a theoretically informed introduction, which also provides a conceptual history of notions of productivity, and by an afterword that brings the approaches explored in this volume into dialogue with scholarship inspired by Marx and Foucault, the individual chapters tackle the concept of productivity from a wide array of angles, each illuminating the promises and problems of a cultural take on the history of economic productivity.