Birth of the Modern
Capitalism / Consumerism
From Wikipedia: Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. With the industrial revolution, but particularly in the 20th century, mass production led to an economic crisis: there was overproduction — the supply of goods would grow beyond consumer demand, and so manufacturers turned to planned obsolescence and advertising to increase consumer spending.
From Wikipedia: Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investment are determined by every owner of wealth, property or production ability in financial and capital markets, whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
Cotton Gin
Empire of Cotton by
The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality to the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven Beckert's rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, and combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially reshape the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia, and how industrial capitalism gave birth to an empire, and how this force transformed the world. The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. The result is a book as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 9780375414145Publication Date: 2014-12-02
The Cotton Gin: The History of Its Invention by
An early history of the cotton gin, published in 1901
Call Number: E-bookISBN: 9781175490100Publication Date: 1901
Cotton: the fabric that made the modern world by
Today's world textile and garment trade is valued at a staggering $425 billion. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalisation, it is India and China that are the new world manufacturing powerhouses. However, this is not a new phenomenon: until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colourful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Cotton explores this earlier globalised economy and its transformation after 1750 as cotton led the way in the industrialisation of Europe. By the early nineteenth century, India, China and the Ottoman Empire switched from world producers to buyers of European cotton textiles, a position that they retained for over two hundred years. This is a fascinating and insightful story which ranges from Asian and European technologies and African slavery to cotton plantations in the Americas and consumer desires across the globe.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 9780521166706Publication Date: 2015-04-16
Cotton: Companies, Fashion & the Fabric of Our Lives by
This book brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to explore the importance of cotton as a major resource for US fashion businesses. It is rooted in a lengthy investigative research project that deployed undergraduate and graduate students and faculty researchers to US fashion businesses that rely on cotton to make their garments--with the goal of better understanding how such a key resource is sourced, priced, transported, manipulated, and, ultimately, sold on to the consumer as a stylish garment. The contributors focus in particular on the role of brands in the marketing of cotton goods, and the way that brand marketing creates distinctions, valuable in the marketplace, between various versions of what are at base similar items of clothing, like t-shirts and underclothes. The book also explores the importance of the "Made in the USA" campaign, with its appeal to consumers concerned about local manufacturing employment, reduced resource use, and social responsibility.
Call Number: HD9875 H35 2016ISBN: 9781783206858Publication Date: 2016-11-15
- 1619 – Podcast no. 2: The Economy that Slavery Built Podcast by Matthew Desmond, Jesmyn Ward, and Nikole Hannah-Jones. The institution of slavery turned a poor, fledgling nation into a financial powerhouse, and the cotton plantation was America’s first big business. Behind the system, and built into it, was the whip.
1851: Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, London
1851: Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Crystal Palace
From Wikipedia: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations or The Great Exhibition, sometimes referred to as the Crystal Palace Exhibition in reference to the temporary structure in which it was held, was an international exhibition that took place in Hyde Park,
- Building the MuseumHistory of the Vitoria & Albert Museum, starting with the Great Exhibition of 1851
- The Great ExhibitionThe British Library and documenting the Great Exhibition of 1851
- Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851Highly detailed and colourful sequence of images was published as a pictorial record of the hugely successful Great Exhibition of 1851. Digitized by The British Library
The Great Exhibition 1851: A Sourcebook by
The Great Exhibition, 1851: A sourcebook is the first anthology of its kind. It presents a comprehensive array of carefully selected primary documents, sourced from the period before, during and after the Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. Drawing on contemporary newspapers and periodicals, thearchives of the Royal Commission, diaries, journals, celebratory poems and essays, many of these documents are reproduced in their entirety, and in the same place, for the first time. The book provides an unparalleled resource for teachers and students of the Exhibition and a starting point for researchers new to the subject. Subdivided into six chapters - Origins and organisation, Display, Nation, empire and ethnicity, Gender, Class and Afterlives - it represents the currentscholarly debates about the Exhibition, orientating readers with helpful, critically informed, introductions. What was the Great Exhibition and what did it mean? Readers of The Great Exhibition, 1851: A sourcebook will take great pleasure in finding out.
Call Number: T690 B1 G745 2017 and E-BookISBN: 9780719099137Publication Date: 2017Crystal Palace by This volume covers one of the most influential buildings of the 19th century. Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace was the first public building to omit references to the past. Amid the historicist debates and battle of the styles of mid-19th-century Britain, Paxton's design was rational and straightforward.
Call Number: NA6750 L66 C79 1994ISBN: 0714829250Publication Date: 1994
Crystal Palace Exhibition Illustrated Catalogue, London 1851
One of modern world's wonders, in which civilized nations exhibited achievements in arts and sciences. More than 1700 items pictured with accompanying text: cast-iron work, pianos, sleds, billiard tables, hundreds of other artifacts. Largest collection of Victorian decorative art ever assembled. xxxvi + 426pp.
Call Number: NK520 G7 L62 1970ISBN: 0486225038Publication Date: 1970
1884: World's Fair, New Orleans
1884: World Cotton Centennial
From Wikipedia: The 1884 World's Fair was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. At a time when nearly one third of all cotton produced in the United States was handled in New Orleans and the city was home to the Cotton Exchange, the idea for the fair was first advanced by the Cotton Planters Association. The name World Cotton Centennial referred to the earliest-surviving record of export of a shipment of cotton from the U.S. to England in 1784. It was also known as the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition.
Practical common sense guide book through the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition at New Orleans ... by
Guide to the 1884 World's Fair in New Orleans.
Call Number: E-BookPublication Date: 1885
Authentic New Orleans by
Chapter 3: “Of Incomprehensible Magnitude and Bewildering Variety: The 1884 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition. In Authentic New Orleans, Kevin Fox Gotham explains how New Orleans became a tourist town, a spectacular locale known as much for its excesses as for its quirky Southern charm. Gotham begins in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina amid the whirlwind of speculation about the rebuilding of the city and the dread of outsiders wiping New Orleans clean of the grit that made it great. He continues with the origins of Carnival and the Mardi Gras celebration in the nineteenth century, showing how, through careful planning and promotion, the city constructed itself as a major tourist attraction. By examining various image-building campaigns and promotional strategies to disseminate a palatable image of New Orleans on a national scale Gotham ultimately establishes New Orleans as one of the originators of the mass tourism industry--which linked leisure to travel, promoted international expositions, and developed the concept of pleasure travel. Gotham shows how New Orleans was able to become one of the most popular tourist attractions in the United States, especially through the transformation of Mardi Gras into a national, even international, event. All the while Gotham is concerned with showing the difference between tourism from above and tourism from below--that is, how New Orleans' distinctiveness is both maximized, some might say exploited, to serve the global economy of tourism as well as how local groups and individuals use tourism to preserve and anchor longstanding communal traditions.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 9780814731857Publication Date: 2007-12-01
Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women's Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World's Fair by
Women from all over the country came to New Orleans in 1884 for the Woman's Department of the Cotton Centennial Exposition, that portion of the World's Fair exhibition devoted to the celebration of women's affairs and industry. Their conversations and interactions played out as a drama of personalities and sectionalism at a transitional moment in the history of the nation. These women planted seeds at the Exposition that would have otherwise taken decades to drift southward.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 9781628461343Publication Date: 2014
Industrial Revolutions
From Wikipedia: Industrialization is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial society, involving the extensive re-organization of an economy for the purpose of manufacturing. As industrial workers' incomes rise, markets for consumer goods and services of all kinds tend to expand and provide a further stimulus to industrial investment and economic growth.
From Wikipedia: The Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, was a phase of rapid industrialization in the final third of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The Second Industrial Revolution is generally dated between 1870 and 1914 (the start of World War I). A number of its characteristic events can be traced to earlier innovations in manufacturing, such as the establishment of a machine tool industry, the development of methods for manufacturing interchangeable parts and the invention of the Bessemer Process to produce steel.
Design History
The Industrial Design Reader by
Co-published with the Design Management Institute, with input from a diverse range of industry experts/designers, theorists, critics, historians, and curators, this anthology is the first to focus exclusively on the history of industrial design. This pioneering guide traces the entire history of industrial design, industrialization, and mass production from 1850 until today.
Call Number: TS171.4 I573 2003ISBN: 1581153104Publication Date: 2003-10-01
The Invention of Craft by
Adamson searches out the origins of modern craft, locating its emergence in the period of the industrial revolution. He demonstrates how craft was invented as industry's other, a necessary counterpart to ideas of progress and upheaval. In the process, the magical and secretive culture of artisans was gradually dominated through division and explication. This left craft with an oppositional stance, a traditional or anti-modern position.
Call Number: TT15 A33 2013ISBN: 9780857850669Publication Date: 2013-04-01
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