Maxine Berg

From imitation to invention : creating commodities in eighteenth-century Britain

This article presents the history of new goods in the eighteenth century as a part of the broader history of invention and industrialization. It focuses on product innovation in manufactured commodities as this engages with economic, technological and cultural theories. Recent theories of consumer demand are applied to the invention of commodities in the eighteenth century; special attention is given to the process of imitation in product innovation. The theoretical framework for imitation can be found in evolutionary theories of mimetic transmission, in archaeological theories of skeuomorphous, and in eighteenth-century theories of taste and aesthetics. Inventors, projectors, economic policy makers, and commercial and economic writers of the period dwelt upon the invention of new British products. The emulative, imitative context for their invention made British consumer goods the distinctive modern alternatives to earlier Asian and European luxuries.

Selling Consumption in the Eighteenth Century

ABSTRACT This article explores the sophisticated visual and textual language of one of the most common, yet overlooked, forms of early advertising – the trade card. Analysis is based on mid-seventeenth- to late eighteenth-century examples within two key collections at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire. The rare examples of continental, particularly French, advertising in the latter collection provide the opportunity to compare the codes and conventions used by English and French retailers. The authors challenge the view that this form of advertising was either primitive or predominantly English.

Britain, industry and perceptions of China: Matthew Boulton, ‘useful knowledge’ and the Macartney Embassy to China 1792–94

Global history has debated the emergence of a divergence in economic growth between China and the West during the eighteenth century. The Macartney Embassy, 1792–94, the first British embassy to China, occurring as it did at the end of the eighteenth century, was an event which revealed changing perceptions of China and the Chinese by different British interest groups from government, trade, industry and enlightened opinion. Many histories of the embassy recount failures of diplomacy and cultural misconception, or divergent ideas of science. This article examines attitudes of British industry to the embassy through the part played in its preparations by the Birmingham industrialist, Matthew Boulton, and revealed in correspondence in the Matthew Boulton Papers. The article uncovers debate among different interest groups over the objects and skilled personnel to be taken on the embassy. Were the objects purveyors of trade or tribute, or of ‘useful knowledge’ and ‘industrial enlightenment’?

The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates

Luxury is no novelty of our own times. The shifting divide between need and desire, necessities and luxuries, was a guiding preoccupation of statesmen and intellectuals at the birth of consumer society in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Luxury was the defining issue of the early modern period. A newly experienced and perceived world economy brought greater access to Asian consumer societies and to the exotic foods and raw materials of the New World. This new trade in luxuries was to stimulate innovation in technologies, products, marketing strategies and commercial and financial institutions. Asian consumer goods — cottons, especially muslins and printed calicoes, silk, porcelain, ornamental brass and ironware, lacquer and paper goods — became imported luxuries in Europe, and were later to become indigenous European consumer goods. The widespread trade in these goods coincided with a new civility in middling and upper-class society, which was conveyed in new ways of eating and socialising. Domestic dining and tea-drinking complemented public leisure in coffee houses, shops, pleasure gardens, assemblies and the theatre.

A woman in history: Eileen Power, 1889-1940

This book tells the fascinating story of the life and work of Eileen Power, a major British historian who once ranked in fame alongside Tawney, Trevelyan and Toynbee. Using letters, diaries and reminiscences, Maxine Berg recreates the life of this charismatic personality, describing, for the first time, Powers remarkable intellectual and scholarly achievements at a time when she was acting very much outside the conventional female role. Her ability, coupled with her vivid writing and pioneer radio broadcasts, made Eileen Powers unique approach to history compelling reading and listening to a whole generation. Dr Berg sets Eileen Powers historical writing in the political and cultural framework of the interwar years, and shows how this early writer of womens and medieval social history helped to create a broad, comparative economic and social history for the succeeding generations.

Useful knowledge, ‘industrial enlightenment’, and the place of India

Research is now turning to the missing place of technology and ‘useful knowledge’ in the debate on the ‘great divergence’ between East and West. Parallel research in the history of science has sought the global dimensions of European knowledge. Joel Mokyrs recent The Enlightened Economy (2009) argued the place of an exceptional ‘industrial enlightenment’ in Europe in explaining industrialization there, but neglected the wide geographic framework of European investigation of the arts and manufactures. This article presents two case studies of European industrial travellers who accessed and described Indian crafts and industries at the time of Britains industrial revolution and Europes Enlightenment discourse on crafts and manufactures. The efforts of Anton Hove and Benjamin Heyne to ‘codify’ the ‘tacit’ knowledge of a part of the world distant from Europe were hindered by the English East India Company and the British state. Their accounts, only published much later, provide insight into European perceptions of Indias ‘useful knowledge’.

Political economy in the twentieth century

This collection of previously unpublished essays discusses the work of a select number of major intellectuals of the recent past (Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa, Maurice Dobb, Michal Kalecki, Paul Sweezy and Joseph Schumpeter). These are not the figures who dominated established economic traditions; they stood, rather, outside the mainstream, acting as critics of the capitalist order and of the theory that sought to explain it. More than a study of leading intellectuals, the book also investigates the principal problems and theoretical inheritance which linked together theorists of otherwise disparate social and political contexts. Students and scholars of the history of economic thought will find many interesting ideas here. It will be a fascinating source of reference for many years to come. The contributors are: Geoff Harcourt; A. K. Sen; Malcolm Sawyer; Josef Steindl; Michael Lebowitz and Tom Bottomore.

East-West Dialogues: Economic Historians, the Cold War, and Détente*

In the late 1950s a new international historical association was conceived, the International Economic HistoryAssociation. From 1960 it organized a succession of major congresses that brought together historians from across Europe, the Soviet Union, and North America, along with smaller numbers from Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and “Third World” countries. The association exists today; its congresses were titled “World Congresses” beginning with the Fifteenth Congress in 2009, when their priorities were directed toward the history of the world economy. But the inception of the association lay in response to the Second World War and the Cold War. The association’s history during the long period of the 1950s into the 1990s was that of an academic body and discipline that saw itself as involved in the process of detente between Western Europe and the United States and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The initiative was not unique: there were already international associations for historians and historians of science, and several social sciences formed similar associations at the time. What marks out this association is the effort that its founders, Fernand Braudel and Michael M. Postan, devoted to connecting West-

Craft and Small Scale Production in the Global Economy: Gujarat and Kachchh in the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Centuries

Indias production of fine luxury and craft goods for world markets was discovered and exploited by Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Textile producers in Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast, and Bengal applied fine craft skills to European designs, colour codes, and textile lengths and widths. Through the intervention of the East India Companies and private traders as well as their intermediaries, brokers and local merchants, weavers, and printers produced the goods to satisfy Western markets just as they had done for Eastern and African markets in the centuries before.

SKILL, CRAFT AND HISTORIES OF INDUSTRIALISATION IN EUROPE AND ASIA

It is time to reexamine craft and small-scale manufacture within our histories of industrialisation, both West and East, and to reflect on the long survival and adaptation of artisanal production even within our globalised world of production and consumption. Historians since the 1950s have addressed craft, skill and labour-intensive production in historical frameworks such as ‘the rise of the factory system’, ‘proto-industrialisation’ and ‘flexible specialisation’. More recently, they have devised other concepts which include labour and skill-intensive production such as ‘industrious revolution’, ‘the great divergence’, ‘knowledge economies’, ‘East Asian development paths’ and ‘cycles of production’. This paper surveys this historiography of craft and skill in models of industrialisation. It then reflects on small-scale industrial structures in current globalisation, emphasising the continued significance of craft and skill over a long history of global transitions. It gives close examination to one region, Gujarat, and its recent industrial and global history. The paper compares industrial production for East India Company trade in the eighteenth century to the recent engagement of the artisans of the Kachchh district of Gujarat in global markets. It draws on the oral histories of seventy-five artisan families to discuss the past and future of craft and skill in the industry of the global economy.