Download or read book An Administrative Bureau During the Old Regime written by Harold Talbot Parker and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This scholarly work throws light on the qualities of the French royal administration during the reign of Louis XVI, which was one of the most enduring legacies of the French monarchy to later regimes, and on the relations of that administration to the French economy and people." "In the Controller General's department, the Bureau of Commerce was the center of administrative thought about the relations of the French royal government to French industry. Through a flow-of-activity, flow-of-consciousness narrative, author Harold T. Parker seeks to discover and to communicate how the Bureau's four executive intendants of commerce, individually and collegially, operated during twenty-nine months in routine performance and in the management of two major crises: the mass mutiny of most French textile artisans against the Bureau's new textile regulations and the developing surge of British inventions, productivity, and competitiveness, especially in textiles and iron and steel." "This book thus bears on the nature of the royal administration on the eve of the French Revolution. It tends to confirm and illustrate the thesis advanced in other monographs that, except in the realm of financing the deficit, Louis XVI was a dutiful and reasonably successful administrative monarch. He appointed professionals to head his major administrative departments - War (Army), Navy, Foreign Affairs, and Controller-Generalcy. He himself did his part in hearing reports and reaching decisions, and together with his ministers and their subordinate civil servants he was restoring French strength in the army, navy, foreign affairs, and administrative/industrial effort." "Not only were the four intendants hampered by the two crises in industry but also by the encrusted legal legacy of multitudinous privileges of provinces, towns, clergy, nobles, semipublic agencies (Farmers General), and other ministerial departments. Nevertheless, in their own minds the intendants thought they were making solid advances toward the development of a balanced French economy." "The response of the French people, it seems, varied. Between the managers at the center of legal authority and power and the subordinate subjects the relationship was not necessarily one of automatic obedience to royal command. Rather there was often a gray zone of stalling and negotiation, always with the lurking possibility of successful defiance of any royal order." "Dr. Parker's study is also a quiet comment on how narrative history ought to be written. Most narrative historians purport to represent symbolically what actually happened - yet they introduce a degree of narrative order and abstraction that never existed. History is actually often meandering and frequently a surprise, and the narrative in this book tries to suggest that. The account is therefore rich both in what it says and in what it suggests."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer written by John R. Harris and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain and France were the leading industrial nations in 18th-century Europe. This book examines the rivalry which existed between the two nations and the methods used by France to obtain the skilled manpower and technology which had given Britain the edge - particularly in the new coal-based technologies. Despite the British Act of 1719 which outlawed industrial espionage and technology transfer, France continued to bring key industrial workers from Britain and to acquire British machinery and production methods. Drawing on a mass of unpublished archival material, this book investigates the nature and application of British laws and the involvement of some major British industrialists in these issues, and discusses the extent to which French espionage had any real success. In the process it presents an in-depth understanding of 18th-century economies, and the cultures and bureaucracies which were so important in shaping economic life. Above all, the late John Harris saw the history of industrial espionage as ’one means of restoring the thoughts and activities of human beings to the centre stage of industrial history’. These are the stories of individuals - Holkers, Trudaines, Wilkinsons, or Milnes - and their impact on the world.

Download or read book Compound Histories written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compound Histories: Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840 offers a new view of the period during which Europe took on its modern character and globally dominant position. By exploring the intertwined realms of production, governance and materials, it places chemists and chemistry at the center of processes most closely identified with the construction of the modern world. This includes the interactive intensification of material and knowledge production; the growth and management of consumption; environmental changes, regulation of materials, markets, landscapes and societies; and practices embodied in political economy. Rather than emphasize revolutionary breaks and the primacy of innovation-driven change, the volume highlights the continuities and accumulation of incremental changes that framed historical development. Contributors are: Robert G.W. Anderson, Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez, John R.R. Christie, Joppe van Driel, Frank A.J.L. James, Christine Lehman, Lissa L. Roberts, Thomas le Roux, Elena Serrano, Anna Simmons, Marie Thébaud-Sorger, Sacha Tomic, Andreas Weber, Simon Werrett.

Download or read book The First Knowledge Economy written by Margaret C. Jacob and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since the Industrial Revolution debate has raged about the sources of the new, sustained western prosperity. Margaret Jacob here argues persuasively for the critical importance of knowledge in Europe's economic transformation during the period from 1750 to 1850, first in Britain and then in selected parts of northern and western Europe. This is a new history of economic development in which minds, books, lectures and education become central. She shows how, armed with knowledge and know-how and inspired by the desire to get rich, entrepreneurs emerged within an industrial culture wedded to scientific knowledge and technology. She charts how, across a series of industries and nations, innovative engineers and entrepreneurs sought to make sense and a profit out of the world around them. Skilled hands matched minds steeped in the knowledge systems new to the eighteenth century to transform the economic destiny of western Europe.

Download or read book A Revolution in Commerce written by Amalia D. Kessler and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Kessler shows how the merchants who were associated with the court - and not just elite thinkers and royal reformers - played a key role in reconceptualizing commerce as the credit-fueled private exchange necessary to sustain the social order. Deploying this modern conception of commerce in a variety of contexts, ranging from litigation over negotiable instruments to corporatist battles for status and jurisdiction, these merchants contributed (largely inadvertently and to their ultimate regret) to the demise of corporatism as both conceptual framework and institutional practice. In so doing, they helped bring about the social and political revolution of 1789." "A Revolution in Commerce provides new insights into the rise of commercial modernity by demonstrating the remarkable role played by the law in ideological and institutional transformation."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Napoleon and Europe written by Philip G. Dwyer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two hundred years ago, Napoleon was at the apogee of his power in Europe. This broad ranging reassessment explores the key themes presented by his extraordinary career: from his rise to power and the foundation of the imperial state, to the final defeat of his grand vision following the doomed invasion of Russia. It was a period of almost uninterrupted war in Europe, the consquences of victory or failure repeatedly transforming the political map. But Napoleon’s impact reached much deeper than this, achieving the ultimate destruction of the ancien regime and feudalism in Europe, and leaving a political and juridical legacy that persists today.

Download or read book The Path Not Taken written by Jeff Horn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-08-29 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Path Not Taken, Jeff Horn argues that—contrary to standard, Anglocentric accounts—French industrialization was not a failed imitation of the laissez-faire British model but the product of a distinctive industrial policy that led, over the long term, to prosperity comparable to Britain's. Despite the upheavals of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, France developed and maintained its own industrial strengths. France was then able to take full advantage of the new technologies and industries that emerged in the "second industrial revolution," and by the end of the nineteenth century some of France's industries were outperforming Britain's handily. The Path Not Taken shows that the foundations of this success were laid during the first industrial revolution. Horn posits that the French state's early attempt to emulate Britain's style of industrial development foundered because of revolutionary politics. The "threat from below" made it impossible for the state or entrepreneurs to control and exploit laborers in the British manner. The French used different means to manage labor unruliness and encourage innovation and entrepreneurialism. Technology is at the heart of Horn's analysis, and he shows that France, unlike England, often preferred still-profitable older methods of production in order to maintain employment and forestall revolution. Horn examines the institutional framework established by Napoleon's most important Minister of the Interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal. He focuses on textiles, chemicals, and steel, looks at how these new institutions created a new industrial environment. Horn's illuminating comparison of French and British industrialization should stir debate among historians, economists, and political scientists.

Download or read book Papermaking in Eighteenth Century France written by Leonard N. Rosenband and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-05-22 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight years before the French Revolution, the paper mill at Vidalon-le-Haut was the setting for a bitter strike and successful lockout. This labor dispute, resulting from conflicts between master papermakers and skilled journeymen, ultimately benefitted the mill's owners and administrators—the Montgolfier family. They converted the 1781 lockout into an opportunity to train a new kind of worker, a malleable employee, and to fashion a new sort of workplace, a theater of technological experiment. Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761-1805, gives us history from the workshop up, offering the most comprehensive exploration available of the historical experience of papermaking. Leonard N. Rosenband explains how paper was made, depicting the tools, techniques, raw materials, and seasonable flows of the craft, and explores the many conflicts and compromises between masters and men. Rosenband provides a compelling account of how technological change affected the papermaking industry, transforming an elaborate, established system of production. The Montgolfier archives are a rich source of information, providing records of daily output and procedures, including complex rules ranging from the precise hours of meals and prayer to matters of propriety and personal sanitation. They also provide insight into the attitudes of the Montgolfier family and their workers—what they made of their trade, their labor, and one another. This case study of the Montgolfier mill, adding details about technological innovation and shopfloor relations during a time of social unrest, enriches the current debate about the nature and impact of capitalism in France during the years leading up to the French Revolution.

Download or read book The Industrial Revolution written by William J. Ashworth and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British Industrial Revolution has long been seen as the spark for modern, global industrialization and sustained economic growth. Indeed the origins of economic history, as a discipline, lie in 19th-century European and North American attempts to understand the foundation of this process. In this book, William J. Ashworth questions some of the orthodoxies concerning the history of the industrial revolution and offers a deep and detailed reassessment of the subject that focuses on the State and its role in the development of key British manufactures. In particular, he explores the role of State regulation and protectionism in nurturing Britain's negligible early manufacturing base. Taking a long view, from the mid 17th century through to the 19th century, the analysis weaves together a vast range of factors to provide one of the fullest analyses of the industrial revolution, and one that places it firmly within a global context, showing that the Industrial Revolution was merely a short moment within a much larger and longer global trajectory. This book is an important intervention in the debates surrounding modern industrial history will be essential reading for anyone interested in global and comparative economic history and the history of globalization.

Download or read book The Imagined Empire written by Mi Gyung Kim and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-12-23 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This popular frenzy for balloon experiments, which attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together. The Imagined Empire explores how this material artifact, the flying machine, not only expanded the public for science and spectacle but inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon, Mi Gyung Kim argues, was a people-machine, a cultural performance that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation. This critical history of ballooning considers how a relatively simple mechanical gadget became an explosive cultural and political phenomenon on the eve of the French Revolution.

Download or read book L onard Bourdon written by Michael J. Sydenham and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lonard Bourdon: The Career of a Revolutionary, 1754-1807 illustrates the ways in which one individual was affected by and influenced the long and turbulent course of the French Revolution. It also rescues an active, intelligent and interesting man from a prolonged period of scholarly neglect and redeems his reputation from being perceived as a particularly cruel revolutionary terrorist. Sydenham follows Bourdon’s political career from the final days of the old monarchy through Bourdon’s active participation in the Revolution. Bourdon was always aware that political development must be accompanied by educational change, and his lifelong interest in education is an integral part of his story. Bourdon left remarkably few personal papers. During the painstaking exploration for details of his life, several critical as well as unfamiliar events of the period have been illuminated, suggesting that similar misrepresentations of many other relatively unknown French revolutionaries have distorted current understanding of this period, crucial to the growth and development of modern democracy.

Download or read book From Louis XIV to Napoleon written by Professor Jeremy Black and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the period 1661-1815 appeared to be the age of France. France was the greatest power in Western Europe in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Louis XIV and Napoleon seemed to dominate their periods. yet when Louis XIV died in 1715, and again after Napoleon's attempt to resume power was defeated at Waterloo a century later, France appeared as a waning power. This failure in Europe was matched on the world scale. France was overtaken by Britain in the struggle for maritime predominance, and ended the period with her empire in ruins. From Louis XIV to Napoleon is a scholarly yet accessible account which considers why France was not more successful and throws light on French history, international relations, warfare and the rise and fall of French power.

Download or read book Trade Empire and British Foreign Policy 1689 1815 written by Jeremy Black and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-01-18 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume examines the influence of trade and empire from 1689 to 1815, a crucial period for British foreign policy and state-building.Jeremy Black, a leading expert on British foreign policy, draws on the wide range of archival material, as well as other sources, in order to ask how far, and through what processes and to what ends, foreign p

Download or read book Conserving the Enlightenment written by Jānis Langins and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of French military engineers at a crucial point in the evolution of modern engineering.

Download or read book The Making of Capitalism in France written by Xavier Lafrance and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Making of Capitalism in France, Xavier Lafrance offers the first thorough analysis of the origins of French capitalism, understood as distinct type of historical society and implying a new mode of class exploitation.

Download or read book Condorcet and Modernity written by David Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Marquis de Condorcet was one of the few Enlightenment ideologists to witness the French Revolution and participate as an elected politician at the centre of events during France's transition from monarchy to republic. Condorcet and Modernity explores the interaction between Condorcet's political theory, legislative pragmatism, public policy proposals and the management of change. David Williams examines key topics including rights, the civil order, the Church, the slave trade, women's civil rights, judicial reform, voting and representation, economics, monarchy, power and revolution. He explores the complex links between Condorcet as the visionary ideologist and Condorcet as the pragmatic legislator, and between Condorcet's concept of modernity - the application of 'social arithmetic' to government policies. Based on an extensive array of both printed and manuscript sources, this major contribution to enlightenment studies is a full treatment of Condorcet's politics.

Download or read book Marriage and Revolution written by Siân Reynolds and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A double biography of Jean-Marie Roland and Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, later Madame Roland, leading figures in the French Revolution.