Technology in the Industrial Revolution

 

Book Description:

Technological change is about more than inventions. This concise history of the Industrial Revolution places the eighteenth-century British Industrial Revolution in global context, locating its causes in government protection, global competition, and colonialism. Inventions from spinning jennies to steam engines came to define an age that culminated in the acceleration of the fashion cycle, the intensification in demand and supply of raw materials and the rise of a plantation system that would reconfigure world history in favor of British (and European) global domination. In this accessible analysis of the classic case of rapid and revolutionary technological change, Barbara Hahn takes readers from the north of England to slavery, cotton plantations, the Anglo-Indian trade and beyond – placing technological change at the center of world history.

Author Bio: 

Dr. Hahn studies and teaches southern history and global history, agriculture, the history of capitalism and the history of technology. Her first book, Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) examined the relationship between the tobacco industry and tobacco agriculture over three centuries. The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (with Bruce E. Baker, Newcastle University) was published in 2016 by Oxford University Press. This book investigates cotton futures trading and the regulation of new financial derivatives in the Progressive Era. She recently completed Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which is short and intended for the undergraduate classroom.

Her research has been supported by the Harvard Business School, the Business History Conference and the Economic History Association, the National Humanities Center, The International Congress for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship to the European Union, among others