Emergence Of Industrial Capitalism Research Articles

Emancipation as an illusion: a review of factory management policies in the Soviet Union and China

ABSTRACT The emergence of industrial capitalism in the 19th century undoubtedly changed production processes in factories, and mass production theories and practices emerged for the first time in human history. Pioneers, namely Taylor and Ford, had revolutionary factory production and management innovations under industrial capitalism. However, the basic rights of workers, along with those of large factories, have been largely neglected. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gramsci began to formulate theories and practices of workers’ emancipation based on the mass production of industrial capitalism. As the two most important socialist countries on Earth, the Soviet Union and China have practiced emancipatory policies at the factory level based on the Marxist ideal. Through a triangular comparison model, this article examines whether the Soviet Union and China have achieved their ideals of worker emancipation. This article proposes a theory of workers’ emancipation, mainly based on the Marxist ideal, while Soviet and Chinese practices are compared horizontally. In the end, the article concludes that both the ideals of the Soviets and Chinese on workers’ emancipation have not been fully achieved despite both having some contributions to worker emancipation; the failure of achieving the emancipatory ideal rendered both countries’ claims on emancipation as mere ‘illusions.’

Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914

Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914

A Latter-day Saint Apostle's Perception of the Southern Bazaar of Liverpool, October 1864

A Latter-day Saint Apostle's Perception of the Southern Bazaar of Liverpool, October 1864

The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement

The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement

Labour in Turkey during the 1960s: The Long Hot Decade of the Working Class

Abstract The 1960s were unique and sui generis years for the labour movement in Turkey. This decade not only witnessed the emergence of industrial capitalism, but also was a critical and intense period of class struggle in which the formation of the country’s working class accelerated. As the working class gained momentum, it proved itself to be a new social class after being dismissed in previous decades. At the beginning of the period, trade unions gained constitutional guarantees, thereby increasing the momentum of the labour movement, even as traditional trade unionism eroded somewhat following a period of dominance in the previous two decades. Ultimately, class-based and independent unionism grew in strength in the 1960s, while the decade also represents a critical moment in the process of working-class politicisation.

Economic crises and industrialisation in Southern Europe: the Valencian cloth-making town of Alcoi (1600 and 1800)

La investigación sobre el desarrollo del capitalismo industrial frecuentemente menosprecia la existencia de procesos de industrialización exitosos en el sur de Europa. El artículo analiza cómo la pañería de la ciudad de Alcoi respondió a las dificultades que enfrentó durante dos crisis que ocurrieron hace casi doscientos años. La primera surgió a fines del siglo XVI y después de la expulsión de los moriscos en 1609. La segunda crisis comenzó entre 1809 y 1815, en el contexto de la Guerra de la Península. Ambas coyunturas provocaron serias dificultades a las actividades manufactureras que se resolvieron con profundos cambios que afectarían, fundamentalmente, a la esfera de la producción. El estudio aclara ciertos aspectos con respecto a la aparición del capitalismo industrial en Alcoi a principios del siglo XIX.

Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America by Thomas J. Brown

Reviewed by: Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America by Thomas J. Brown Robert Cook (bio) Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America. By Thomas J. Brown. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 366. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $29.95.) Recent controversies over the removal of Confederate statues have highlighted the centrality of Civil War memory to the ongoing culture wars in the United States. In this absorbing study, Thomas J. Brown assesses [End Page 432] the construction of Civil War monuments across the country in the decades after 1865 and convincingly connects the building of a new commemorative landscape to the rapid militarization of the republic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The result is the most important book on American Civil War commemoration to be published in several years—not only for the persuasiveness of the argument but also because it places art and architecture where they should be: at the vital center of memory studies. Brown begins by reminding readers that today’s assaults on Confederate monuments were prefigured by the demolition of King George III’s New York statue at the start of the Revolution. But such iconoclasm, he makes clear, was not the American way during the nineteenth or the twentieth century. After a slow start in the early republic, four years of mass death in the first half of the 1860s triggered a rising tide of military monument building. Brown detects two principal phases of construction. The first occurred in a period of collective mourning in which the republican ideals of the antebellum years remained resonant. It began during the war itself and continued through the Reconstruction era. Monuments in this phase generally memorialized the citizen-soldiers who had died during the conflict rather than those who had survived it and often displayed the impact of grief on those who funded them. Some, like Martin Milmore’s strange Sphinx in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were allegorical. Others, like Harvard Memorial Hall, were utilitarian or depicted individual soldiers in contemplative mode and at rest rather than in the heat of battle. By the 1880s, however, representations of the Civil War began to change. A second and far more active phase of monument building, lasting into the second decade of the twentieth century, witnessed a proliferation of new artistic representations of the conflict. It was fostered by the veterans’ determination to commemorate their own sacrifices as well as those of their dead comrades, by the growth of industrial capitalism, and by the United States’ emergence as a colonial power and the attendant need for a larger and more professional army. In three fine central chapters, Brown subjects these forms to expert scrutiny. He discusses the growing popularity of monuments depicting flag bearers, combat groups, and armed, muscular soldiers, identifying them as indicators of Americans’ newfound fondness for the military. He finds abundant evidence of governing elites’ determination to nurture civic ideals fit for the modern age in the building of equestrian statues of Civil War leaders like Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Robert E. Lee. The uncritical patriotism championed by many members of the Grand Army of the Republic and swelled by the war with Spain was [End Page 433] channeled into the construction of triumphal Union arches and columns in various cities, including Brooklyn, Indianapolis, and Cleveland, as well as into explicitly reconciliatory monuments that lauded North-South amity and helped Americans forget the ideological divisions of the 1860s. In his fifth and final chapter, Brown narrates the decline of Civil War monument building after 1914 while also making clear the impact of the second phase on Great War memorialization in the United States, evidenced by widespread commemoration of veterans’ military service (not overwhelmingly that of the fallen, as in Great Britain) and the relative absence of reminders of the terrible impact of war on families (as in France). This book has many strengths: the author’s strikingly fresh interpretations of familiar and unfamiliar Civil War monuments, his conviction that sectional differences should not obscure fundamental similarities between northern and southern commemorative practices, his awareness of the central role played by class and gender...

Kajian Fast Fashion dalam Percepatan Budaya Konsumerisme

The emergence of Industrial capitalism has introduced various forms of commodities which is basicly produced to meet the human needs that subtantly do not change a way of human life, but gradually changed into something entirely run by a social class strategy, and one of them is fashion. Fashion marketing and the creation of fashionable images that made by the capitalists through the media make many people forced, then become bound in following the fashion world. People are made to be obliged to buy the latest or trendy goods with various brands and prices to be regarded as modern humans who follow the times. Until now, the fashion industry has blended with the phenomenon of life acceleration (dromology), where every fashion product is produced and marketed superfastly to the modernists who are the latest lifestyle consumption trend, bringing fashion business to the next stage, Fast Fashion. But on the other hand Fast Fashion development also gives a very significant influence for the society in the culture of consumerism, eliminating awareness of what is appropriate and able to wear, and what is capable and important to have. And closely related in the humanity will empathy towards fellow human beings and also the environment
 Keywords: Fashion, Fast Fashion, Commodity, Consumerism, Capitalism, Environment.

The Novel after Nature, Nature after the Novel: Richard Jefferies’s Anthropocene Romance

The history of the novel must be re-thought in light of the emergence of the Anthropocene. The period associated with the “rise of the novel” in the eighteenth and nineteenth century dovetails with the emergence of industrial capitalism, the shift to fossil fuels, and European imperialism, all of which are now recognized as key elements in the scaling-up of human activity to planetary scale. It also aligns with the emergence of modern geology and the stratigraphic method currently being used to date the Anthropocene as a formal epoch on the geologic time scale (GTS). Thus, if the Anthropocene presents the work of the novel “after nature” it also represents the state of nature “after” the novel. This convergence suggests that the rise of the novel may also mark the birth of the Anthropocene. It also raises troubling questions about whether such coincidence may in fact reveal complicity. To what degree is the novel itself bound up in the forces responsible for drawing the Holocene to a close? What does it mean to re-visit the history of the novel as an “end-Holocene” genre, and what would that designation suggest about the genre’s viability in the epoch to come? This article takes up these questions through a reading of Richard Jefferies’s After London, or Wild England (1885) as a formative instance of “cli fi” that explicitly disavows the designation of “novel” in favor of “romance.” In the process, it argues for a more historically expansive conception of cli fi, and points to potential intersections between ecocriticism, textual studies, and book history.

The Global Career of Indian Opium and Local Destinies

Abstract: As is well known, opium was a major colonial commodity. It was linked to trade in several other commodities of the modern era such as tea, sugar and cotton and through these to Atlantic the slave trade. The movement of these commodities across continents shaped capitalism in very specific ways. In the case of India, for instance, earnings from the several components of the opium enterprise played an important role in the growth of industrial capitalism. This paper looks at the historical circumstances in which various localities and regions of the Indian subcontinent, especially western India, and the Indian Ocean became part of the opium enterprise during the early nineteenth century. It attempts to understand the manner in which local destinies were linked to the global, reinforcing and/or resisting British imperial interests. For this purpose I have chosen the port of Daman, on the West Coast of India as a representative example. Daman (Damao) was a Portuguese colony. The paper pays close attention to political processes at the local level so as to make sense of global patterns of trade in a commodity that was vital for sustaining the British Empire.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

Reviewed by: Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert Jonathan E. Robins Sven Beckert. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. xxii + 615 pp. ISBN 978-0-375-41414-5, $35 (cloth). Sven Beckert’s long-awaited second book examines the central role of cotton in the making of capitalism. As Beckert and others have argued, writing the “history of capitalism” demands an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, and Empire of Cotton does not disappoint. Economic, political, social, and cultural themes are interwoven throughout the book as Beckert follows cotton—“one of the very few human-made goods that is available virtually anywhere”— across continents and oceans (p. xiii). The first chapter surveys the ancient history of cotton, but the real substance of the book is Beckert’s analysis of cotton as an engine of European expansion, capital accumulation, and industrialization after the sixteenth century. Beckert rejects the label of “merchant capitalism” to describe the political economy of European empire building in favor of a neologism, “war capitalism” (p. xv). This is an empirical description more than it is a theoretical concept. As Beckert amply demonstrates, state-backed violence was at the heart of capital accumulation between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, smashing open new markets and commandeering goods, land, and labor for the benefit of firms and individuals. Several chapters evoke Eric Williams’ famous thesis on slavery and industrialization, but Beckert identifies the flexibility of slave labor in the Americas, rather than plantation profits, as the key factor behind the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe. The early British spinning mills would easily have exhausted any capacity for expansion in the world’s other cotton-producing regions had the American South not arrived as a major exporter in the early nineteenth century, and the South met rising demand for raw cotton by exploiting land and labor on an unparalleled scale. African captives bought with cotton cloth— first with Indian fabric, then with European substitutes—were put to work growing cotton on land seized from native Americans. This was possible only in the Atlantic basin: Waging war to steal labor and land on the scale necessary to feed Europe’s new mechanized spinning mills could not have “even been dreamed of in Anatolia or Gujarat” (p. 108). The dynamism of the Atlantic system produced fortunes in Europe and the Americas, but it drove once-dominant agricultural and manufacturing regions in Asia into decline. The second half of the book focuses on the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath. Beckert insists that state power and violence remained important even as capitalists came to the fore in the nineteenth century. Governments used bounties and tariffs to [End Page 991] foster infant industries, forced colonies to accept manufactured textiles, and helped manufacturers recruit and discipline a new class of proletarian workers for cotton mills. The American Civil War strained this expanding “empire,” but Beckert argues that the war ultimately “emancipated” cotton agriculture from slavery. In America, the line of argument is clear enough: Private and public violence created new labor regimes based on sharecropping and wage labor. In other parts of the world, the processes of change are less clear. From Berar to Brazil, cotton-growing peasants became utterly dependent on the world market for their survival, but it is not clear why this had to wait until the late nineteenth century, especially as Beckert argues that these communities had successfully resisted earlier efforts to intensify commodity production. The argument becomes clearer in Chapter 12, in which Beckert returns to the themes of state power and market making, this time looking at the “new imperialism” and the remarkable expansion of cotton agriculture in Africa and Asia in the twentieth century. Overt violence still played a role, but the bureaucratic violence of taxes, regulations, and coerced labor became more important in transforming peasants into specialized commodity producers. The last two chapters address the sudden collapse of the European core of the “empire of cotton.” In Beckert’s narrative, cotton manufacturing shifted from Europe to Asia because of a combination of entrepreneurship on the periphery, anticolonial mobilization, and rebellion among workers in the industrial core. The book moves quickly from...

The Power of Exercise and the Exercise of Power: The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, Distance Running, and the Disappearance of Work, 1919–1947

In the early twentieth century, fatigue research marked an area of conflicting scientific, industrial, and cultural understandings of working bodies. These different understandings of the working body marked a key site of political conflict during the growth of industrial capitalism. Many fatigue researchers understood fatigue to be a physiological fact and allied themselves with Progressive-era reformers in urging industrial regulation. Opposed to these researchers were advocates of Taylorism and scientific management, who held that fatigue was a mental event and that productivity could be perpetually increased through managerial efficiency. Histories of this conflict typically cease with the end of the First World War, when it is assumed that industrial fatigue research withered away. This article extends the history of fatigue research through examining the activities of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory in the 1920s and 1930s. The Laboratory developed sophisticated biochemical techniques to study the blood of exercising individuals. In particular, it found that exercising individuals could attain a biochemically "steady state," or equilibrium, and extrapolated from this to assert that fatigue was psychological, not physiological, in nature. In contrast to Progressive-era research, the Laboratory reached this conclusion through laboratory examination, not of industrial workers, but of Laboratory staff members and champion marathon runners. The translation of laboratory research to industrial settings, and the eventual erasure of physiological fatigue from discussions of labor, was a complex function of institutional settings, scientific innovation, and the cultural meanings of work and sport.

From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History

This article examines the history of how Chinese pig breeds came to Europe and later America. While Asian hogs were domesticated for feeding on waste and agricultural by-products, ancient European hogs had to range in forests for mast, producing a leaner, more wild type. As European forests were cleared, mast feeding came under recurring pressure, creating incentives for improved swine management and breeding. In the eighteenth century, as Northern European agriculture intensified, Chinese pigs were imported to create improved varieties first in England and then in America. These new breeds, with their enhanced capacity for rapid weight gain, played a vital role in the pig's transformation from a small-farm subsistence animal into an industrial meat producer. The article analyzes this history of pig breeds as a microcosm of early modern globalization and the emergence of industrial capitalism, as well as a case study of how interdisciplinary evidence and evolutionary perspectives can contribute to the emerging field of animal studies.

Between Vision and Practice: Archaeological Perspectives on the Llano del Rio Cooperative

Ideology is perhaps nowhere more patently visible in the archaeological record than at utopian communities. While ideology informs all human action, the tenets of utopian ventures operate on a more fully conscious level than those underlying mainstream culture. The deliberate use of symbolism is a hallmark of the way utopians sought to define themselves and their visions. By comparing these utopian visions with the actual practices of such groups, archaeologists can deepen understandings of the challenges and lessons evolving from the pursuit of such experiments. Recent archaeological investigations at the Llano del Rio Cooperative are used to explore these issues. Socialists established the Llano cooperative near Los Angeles in 1914 as an act of political and economic resistance to the growth of industrial capitalism. There, the colonists sought to create a self-sufficient, secular, egalitarian community that would demonstrate a viable alternative to capitalistic exploitation.

Expanding the Mandate

Since its inception, Leonardo’s mandate has been to explore the intersection between the arts, sciences and technology. Now there is a 500-pound question on the table: Can the mandate of Leonardo be expanded to explore the intersection between art, science, technology and society? In the 19th century, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre of France and William Henry Fox Talbot of Great Britain, credited individually with the invention of photography, both happened to take photographs of their respective collections during their initial investigations of photographic processes. Daguerre photographed his fossil collection and Talbot his collection of china. Subsequent commentary has positioned these choices in the context of the intellectual and historical environment of the 19th century, a time of cataloging the physical and biological world as the concepts of the electromagnetic spectrum, the periodic table and phrenology were being developed. Thus, what appeared at the time to be the incidental and objective documentation of collections can be understood, in the context of history, as reflecting the values of the time period. In Weimar Germany, during the post–World War I 1920s, artists began investigating the physical world from a new frame of reference, which they termed Neue Sachlichkeit, or the new objectivity. These artists, including Albert Renger-Patzsch, Karl Blossfeldt and T. Lux Feininger, photographed the world from unconventional vantage points in an attempt create a new aesthetic, one that they viewed as apolitical and objective. Their subject matter included the technology of the era’s growing industrialization, and many of their images of nature also reflect this industrial vision. When juxtaposed against the history of the time—-the growth of fascism and decline of labor movements—-these images are understood in a more complex way as reflecting the values of the corporate industrial state. In the United States, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Charles Sheeler and other photographers were the counterparts to the German Neue Sachlichkeit artists. From the vantage point of history we can read their images in several ways. For instance, as Sally Stein pointed out in a public lecture when analyzing Paul Strand’s image of a white fence, we either can see it as an example of Strand’s ability to abstract the physical world, or, if we look at it in the context of the time period, we can consider the point that the growth of industrial capitalism was resulting in the promotion of single-family homeownership, and fences suggested private ownership of property. So, while the image can be read as neutral, as an abstraction, it also can be read as reflecting the history and values of the time in which it was produced. Today, can we look at the intersections of art, science and technology and, with the understanding that we have gained from our dialogue with history, begin to comment on and assess these intersections in terms of their sociopolitical, economic and historic implications? Or must we wait for future generations to do this? Given the conditions in the world today, in which most of the world’s population lacks adequate food, potable water, health care or educational opportunities, the AIDS epidemic is spreading in Africa and parts of Asia, and the war in Iraq rages on, some contextualization of these explorations is critical in order to render them historically and socially intelligible. The 500-pound question on the table remains: Can the mandate of Leonardo be expanded to explore the intersection between art, science, technology and society?

'Show Me the Money!'

'Show Me the Money!'

The East in the West

Sociological and historical enquiry in Europe has had as a continuing pre-occupation the problem of the Uniqueness of the West, the search for factors that can be held responsible for its achievements in the modern world and in particular the emergence of industrial capitalism. That search has led to a devaluation of the East and consequently a mistaken self-understanding of the West. This article attempts to outline the problem with regard to rationality, commercial literacy (book-keeping), mercantile enterprise and family participation in such activity.

Social theory and the substantive problems of sociology

The history of sociology indicates that social theory may be formu? lated from a great variety of perspectives and can have many sources and social functions. Regardless of the ideological standpoint from which it may be written, theory reflects the historical period of the author who has for? mulated it and reveals what its authors thought were salient problems for sociological investigation. In this sense, the sociological literature of a period is bound to its own historical content. From one perspective or another, all 19th and early 20th century theorists focussed upon issues that were connected with the decline and transformation of feudal society and the emergence of industrial capitalism. Some of these theorists focussed on the decline of liberalism and the ap? pearance of centralized, mass, bureaucratic society and the secondary social problems resulting from these developments. Thus, our images of the ear? lier history of the institutions of the modern capitalistic order are provided for us by those authors who attempted to analyze the then emerging social order of modernity.

Belleville and Environs

This article suggests that while the economic, political and social context provided by the development of capitalism is the framework for the study of the absorption of semi-autarchic economies and local cultures into increasingly broader regional, national and international systems during the nineteenth century, the concepts of modernization and metropolitanism are spatially over-generalized. While it is true that rural communities and small towns in Upper Canada were integrated right from the beginning into these larger systems of production, they on their own played an essential role in satisfying the need for continuity and community, however defined. Smaller urban centres experiencing stagnation or decline during the period of the "Great Transformation" were not all incipient metropolises; some of these centres continued to depend on the export of staples and developed regional specialization in the development and marketing of these products. This examination of Belleville and its relationship with its hinterland supports the case for a contextual approach to the study of the transformation of rural society with the growth of industrial capitalism.

Family Enterprise in an Industrial City: Strategies for the Family Organization of Business in Detroit, 1880

While families have historically provided the basis of business organization in the United States, in the late nineteenth century the development of corporations and managerial capitalism weakened their role in business, especially in management (Bell 1962; Chandler 1977; Farber 1972; Hall 1977,1988; Kanter 1978; Mills 1956; Shammas et al. 1987). Chandler (1977) has postulated a historical decline in family management, control, and decision making in firms with the growth of industrial capitalism; others have asserted a continued presence of the family in business ownership (Davis and Stern 1980; Lansberg et al. 1988).