Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:5th Jan '17
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Small businesses were at the heart of the economic growth and social transformation that characterized the industrial revolution in Britain. In towns across north-west England, shops and workshops dominated the streetscape, and helped to satisfy an increasing desire for consumer goods. Yet despite their significance, we know surprisingly little about these firms and the people who ran them, for whilst those engaged in craft-based manufacturing, retailing, and allied trades constituted a significant proportion of the urban population, they have been generally overlooked by historians. Instead, our view of the world of business is more usually taken up by narratives of particularly successful firms, and especially those involved in new modes of production. By examining some of the forgotten businesses of the industrial revolution, and the men and women who worked in them, Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution presents a largely unfamiliar commercial world. Its approach, which spans economic, social, and cultural history, as well as encompassing business history and the histories of the emotions, space, and material culture, alongside studies of personal testimony, testatory practice, and property ownership, tests current understandings of gender, work, family, class, and power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It provides us with new insights into the lives of ordinary men and women in trade, whose relatively mundane lives are easily overlooked, but who were central to the story of a pivotal period in British history.
Deftly written and assiduously researched, this study should be welcomed by a wide range of scholars, including those in business, economic, and social history, in family history, and in urban and even architectural history * Andrew Popp, University of Liverpool, Economic History Review *
Barker skilfully elicits a culture immersed in a prevailing ideology of harmony built on honor, reputation, and equity; an emotional world that expressed itself in terms of companionate marriages and affectionate parenting; and a built world that embodied hierarchies and gendered differences rather than public and private spaces ... Highly recommended. * CHOICE *
- Winner of Winner of the Social History Society Book Prize for 2019.
ISBN: 9780198786023
Dimensions: 242mm x 162mm x 25mm
Weight: 558g
280 pages