History

Britain was the industrial and political powerhouse of the nineteenth century--the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the center of the largest empire of the time. With its broad imperial reach--and even broader indirect influence--Britain had a major impact on nineteenth-century material culture worldwide. Because British manufactured goods were widespread in British colonies and beyond, a more nuanced understanding of those goods can enhance the archaeological study of the people who used them far beyond Britain's shores. However, until recently archaeologists have given relatively little attention to such goods in Britain itself, thereby missing what is often revealing and useful contextual information for historical archaeologists working in countries where British goods were consumed while also leaving significant portions of Britain's own archaeological record poorly understood.   The Importance of British Material Culture to Historical Archaeologies of the Nineteenth Century helps fill these gaps, through case studies demonstrating the importance and meaning of mass-produced material culture in Britain from the birth of the Industrial Revolution (mid-1700s) to early World War II. By examining many disparate items--such as ceramics made for export, various goods related to food culture, Scottish land documents, and artifacts of death--these studies enrich both an understanding of Britain itself and the many places it influenced during the height of its international power.

A major study of the role of women in the labour market of Industrial Revolution Britain. It is well known that men and women usually worked in different occupations, and that women earned lower wages than men. These differences are usually attributed to custom but Joyce Burnette here demonstrates instead that gender differences in occupations and wages were instead largely driven by market forces. Her findings reveal that rather than harming women competition actually helped them by eroding the power that male workers needed to restrict female employment and minimising the gender wage gap by sorting women into the least strength-intensive occupations. Where the strength requirements of an occupation made women less productive than men, occupational segregation maximised both economic efficiency and female incomes. She shows that women's wages were then market wages rather than customary and the gender wage gap resulted from actual differences in productivity.

This book examines the changing social political and economics landscapes that continue to shape and define the Britain and America that we know today. The industrial Revolution was defined by technology in cotton spinning, in the building of canals, railways and telegraphy. The intensity of economic change meant changes in social and political expectations from the Chartists seeking to widen the franchise in Britain to Civil War and slavery in America. Social progress ebbs and flows; nothing in history is linear. Strikes were won and lost. Coxey's army marched to show the plight of unemployment as many others would do during the Depression of the 1930s. America had the New Deal and Britain provided social forms of protection to deal with unemployment. The 1950s to 1970s are described as the years of calm waters of fully employment continuing prosperity people buying their first cars their first homes and domestic appliances. Stagflation became the problem for the 1980s of dealing with inflation and revisiting unemployment to new prosperity of the 1990s and the financial meltdown of 2008. People in 2020 have different lived experiences to those of 1820. Yet life in 2020 brings new but different challenges to 1820. The books is aimed at students of history of economics of social change and politics. It is however also aimed at a wider readership as it tries to tell 200 years of history as a journey that continues to shape both countries.