Books in the People, Markets, Goods: Economies and Societies in History series

Many more people encountered newspapers, business press products or jobbing print than the glamorous books of the Enlightenment. This book looks at the way in which print effected a business revolution.

Exploring how crises have shaped economic and social life from the thirteenth century to the twenty-first.

An engagingly written account of textile engineering in its key northern centres, rich with historical narrative and analysis.

As a new consumer culture took root in eighteenth-century England and shops proliferated, the crime of shoplifting leaped to public prominence.

A comprehensive study of the occupational health of employed children within the broader context of social, industrial and environmental change between 1780 and 1850.

Examines the two largest Quaker communities in the early modern British Atlantic World, and scrutinizes the role of Quaker merchants and the business ethics they followed.The book studies the two largest Quaker communities in the early modern British Atlantic World, London and Philadelphia. It looks at the origins of the Society of Friends in mid seventeenth century England and follows its development into a well organised sect with a sophisticated organisational structure spreading across the Atlantic world. The book zooms in on the Quaker communities in these two important port cities, as well as their relationships withnon-Quaker inhabitants. It scrutinizes the role of Quaker merchants and the business ethics they followed. Drawing on many unpublished sources, the study is able to portray a mid-eighteenth-century crisis for the Quaker communities when sanctions for offences against the prevailing disciplines in business (fraud, debt, bankruptcy) and marriage increased dramatically. And yet these Quaker communities got likewise caught up in wider political developments across the British Empire. In the course of a series of conflicts affecting colonial Pennsylvania in the mid eighteenth century, the Society of Friends suffered grave reputational damage. The public in England and Pennsylvania began to perceive Quakers as a sect that put its own agenda and interest over the welfare of the colonial population and the Empire. In turn, these developments led to a "e;Quaker reformation"e; and Quaker identity became guided by new principles: honesty in business and religious marital endogamy. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of economic and Atlantic history, as well as Eighteenth-Century studies and religious history.ESTHER SAHLE is Lecturer at the University of Oldenburg. She holds an MSc in Global History and a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics.

This book links the world of finance directly to the fate of the cotton and textile industry, long a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain as a manufacturing economy, for the first time.The cotton and textile industry, at the centre of the industrial revolution, has long been a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain as a manufacturing economy. This book links the world of finance directly to the fate of the cotton and textile industry for the first time. Using a unique underlying data-set drawn from financial business records of over 100 cotton and textile-manufacturing firms based in Lancashire, and ranging from the late eighteenth tothe twenty-first century, Financing Cotton analyses the dynamics of industrial capitalism by uncovering the interaction between financial systems and technological development and innovation. It offers new perspectives onbusiness practices and their evolution, as well as decisions taken by entrepreneurs, managers and employees. The book broadly investigates five questions: how and why were individual firms profitable and what happened to these profits; how did the firms' financial structure and performance influence their attitudes to employment regulation; what were the effects of financial networks and institutions on the characteristics of the first and second phase ofindustrialisation; how did the financial system enable or stifle entrepreneurship and investment in new technology and, finally, why did consolidation and industrial restructuring offer survival options for some firms, but not forothers? STEVEN TOMS is Professor of Accounting at the Leeds University Business School.

Globalized Peripheries examines the commodity flows and financial ties within Central and Eastern Europe in order to situate these regions as important contributors to Atlantic trade networks.The early modern Atlantic world, with its flows of bullion, of free and unfree labourers, of colonial produce and of manufactures from Europe and Asia, with mercantile networks and rent-seeking capital, has to date been describedalmost entirely as the preserve of the Western sea powers. More recent scholarship has rediscovered the dense entanglements with Central and Eastern Europe. Globalized Peripheries goes further by looking beyond slaveryand American plantations. Contributions look at the trading practices and networks of merchants established in Central and Eastern Europe, investigate commodity flows between these regions and the Atlantic world, and explore the production of export commodities, two-way migration as well as financial ties. The volume uncovers new economic and financial connections between Prussia, the Habsburg Empire, Russia, as well as northern and western Germany with the Atlantic world. Its period coverage connects the end of the early modern world with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. JUTTA WIMMLER is a research group leader at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. KLAUS WEBER holds the chair of European Economic and Social History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). CONTRIBUTORS: Bernhard Struck, Anka Steffen, Jutta Wimmler, Friederike Gehrmann, Torsten dos Santos Arnold, Klemens Kaps, Anne Sophie Overkamp, Margrit Schulte Beerbuhl, Josef Kostlbauer, Alexandra Gittermann, David K. Thomson, Goran Ryden.