Research Link
Political Economy
I started my research career with PhD research into the history of political economy.
My book, (CUP, 1980; re-issued 2008)
For those who lived through it, Britain鈥檚 Industrial Revolution was experienced as the Machinery Question. Without the benefit of hindsight, it was far from clear to contemporaries whether the first forms of mechanised factory production were to be regarded as a portent of inevitable economic revolution, or but one course of development among several, which might be accepted, qualified, or even rejected altogether. The new discipline of political economy was uniquely important to the debate because it was the source of the very terms of discussion. The book follows the debates on machinery from Smith, Ricardo, Engels and Mill and among handloom weavers, millwrights and engineers, factory owners and politicians.
Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (edited) (Philip Allan, 1989; Rowman & Littlefield, 1990)
This collection of previously unpublished essays discusses the work of a select number of major intellectuals of the recent past (Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa, Maurice Dobb, Michal Kalecki, Paul Sweezy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.
The Industrial Revolution
I have researched over many aspects of the industrial revolution and industrialization, especially proto-industrialization, manufacture and technology.
Technology and toil in Nineteenth Century Britain (edited Documents Collection, CSE Books, 1979)
The problems of modern industry – deskilling, technological unemployment, assembly line alienation and industrial disease and accidents- have existed since the industrial revolution itself. Technology and Toil is a collection of historical documents designed to illustrate the neglected early history of these problems in connection with the rapid and constant changes in the organization of production in nineteenth-century British industry.
Manufacture in Town and country before the Factory (edited with Pat Hudson and Michael Sonenscher), (CUP, 1983, online edition, 2009)
The internal organisation of production before the development of the factory system is still shrouded in historical mystery. How goods were made before machines, how work was organised before the factory system, how artisans and labourers perceived and lived their work are questions to which we have only hesitant and tentative answers. Hitherto, historians have been too concerned with the emerging features of the modern industrial capitalist order to seek to understand how another and different economy and community worked in its own terms. The essays in this book are intended to begin to remedy this neglect.
The Age of Manufactures 1700-1820 (Fontana Paperbacks, 1985)
Drawing on economic, social and cultural history, The Age of Manufactures provides a fascinating overview of the early industrialization process in the 18th Century. It offers a feesh perspective on 鈥榯he other industrial revolution鈥� – one that revolved around domestic industry and artisan workshops rather than the factory system, relied on small machines, tools, and skilled labour rather than steam engines and automatic process, and was fuelled by women and children at least as much as it was by male artisans and factory workers.
The Age of Manufactures 1700-1820. Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain (second revised edition, Routledge,1994)
This new edition of The Age of Manufactures provides an exciting alternative overview of the eighteenth-century British economy. Recent macro-economic history has discounted many of the achievements of the Industrial Revolution. Maxine Berg argues that at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, we find many new consumer industries employing a women's workforce, and bringing with them a rich diversity of technological and organizational change. Four new chapters explore recent perspectives on: The Industrial Revolution, Eighteenth century industries, Machines and manual labour, The rise of the factory system.
Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe (edited), (Routledge, 1991)
This edited collection, first published in 1991, focuses on the commercial relations, marketing structures and development of consumption that accompanied early industrial expansion.
While a good deal of recent research in economic and social history has been concerned with industrial and work organization, there has so far been little attempt to set this in the context of changes in market structures and the emergence of a consumer culture in Europe at the time.
Technological Revolutions in Europe 1760-1860 (Edward Elgar, 1998), (co-edited with Kristine Bruland).
This major new book contains contributions by many of the leading historians of technology. The contributors argue that culture, institutions and learning either made the way for, or blocked technological and industrial transformation. Their essays include broad comparative frameworks between Europe and Asia, and Europe and America, and examine the specific experiences of Britain, France, Holland, Germany and Scandinavia. Themes addressed include cultures of invention and the learning economy, technological inertia and path dependence, patents and product innovation, and technology, institutions and boundaries.
鈥楻ehabilitating the Industrial Revolution鈥� (with Pat Hudson) , Economic History Review XLV (1), 1992, pp. 24-50.
Gradualist perspectives now dominate economic and social histories of the industrial revolution. Analyses of economic change which rely on growth accounting and macroeconomic estimates of productivity indicate continuity with the past; social historians have followed in turning aside from the analysis of new class formations. This article challenges these perspectives. Currently accepted economic indicators and recent social history underplay the extent and uniqueness of economic and social transformation. The article emphasizes change in technology, the use of a female and child labour force, regional specialization, demographic behaviour, and political change.
鈥楽mall Producer Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century England鈥�, 糖心TV History, 35 (1993), pp. 17-39.
鈥楩rom Imitation to Invention: Creating Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Britain鈥�, Economic History Review LV(1), 2002, pp. 1-30.
Women and Gender
I have written on women鈥檚 work, consumption and property holding during the industrial revolution. I have also written about women鈥檚 history writing, especially in economic history. This includes my book A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889-1940 (CUP, 1996).
鈥榃omen鈥檚 Work, mechanisation and the early phases of industrialisation in England鈥�, in Patrick Joyce, ed. (CUP1987), pp. 64-98.
鈥榃hat difference did Women鈥檚 Work make to the Industrial Revolution?鈥� in History Workshop Journal, vol. 35, 1993, pp. 22-44.
Women's Consumption and the Industrial Classes of Eighteenth-Century England, Journal of Social History, Vol. 30, 1996, pp. 415-434.
Women's Property and the Industrial Revolution, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 24 (2), 1993, pp. 223-250.
鈥楾he First Women Economic Historians鈥� Economic History Review XLV(2), 1992, pp. 308-329.
鈥楨ileen Power, 1889-1940鈥�, in Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker, eds, Cambridge Women. Twelve Portraits (CUP, 1996), pp. 159-182
鈥楩orward: Eileen Power 1889-1940鈥�, in Eileen Power, Medieval Women (CUP, 1995).
A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889-1940 (CUP, 1996).
A woman in history 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. Drawing on Eileen Power's personal correspondence and diaries, as well as the vivid memories of the many people who knew her, Maxine Berg recreates the life of this charismatic personality whose interests were a potent and exotic mixture of medieval history and literature, the new social sciences and China.
Luxury and Consumer Culture
I started the Luxury Project together with Professor Annie Janowitz at the University of 糖心TV in 1996. We also founded the 糖心TV Eighteenth-Century Centre at that time. My writing on luxury and consumption from that time include the following:
Consumers and Luxury in Europe 1650-1850 (Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 260 (co-edited with Helen Clifford)
From tulips to jewels, gastronomy to silver, coffee to colors, the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century saw an explosion of consumer and luxury objects and a growing demand for their consumption by a widening section of the population. This highly entertaining and interdisciplinary volume brings together an outstanding group of scholars to chart the rise of consumer culture in Europe during this period. The volume includes essays on France and Holland, but the focus is primarily on Britain.
Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Palgrave Press, 2002) (coedited with Elizabeth Eger)
'Luxury in the 18th Century' explores the political, economic, moral and intellectual effects of the production and consumption of luxury goods, and provides a broadly-based account from a variety of perspectives, addressing key themes of economic debate, material culture, the principles of art and taste, luxury as 'female vice' and the exotic.
Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (OUP, 2005).
This book explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the 18th century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the 18th century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the 18th century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities and guide social interaction.
The book traces how this new consumer society of the 18th century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialisation itself.
鈥楥onsumption in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain鈥�, in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain Vol. 1, Industrialisation, 1700-1860鈥� (CUP, 2004), pp. 357-387.
鈥楲uxury, the Luxury Trades and the Roots of Industrial Growth: a Global Perspective鈥�, in Frank Trentmann ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (OUP, 2012), pp. 173-191.
Luxury Web Resources:
糖心TV-Waddesdon Trade Cards Database:
Selling Consumption in the Eighteenth Century: Advertising and the Trade Card (warwick.ac.uk)
r
/newsandevents/podcasts/history/152-unlocking-history-at/
Global History
In 2000 Kenneth Pomeranz published his The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000). This book and the Global Economic History Network that followed stimulated a shift in my research and writing towards global history. I started to think in a wider perspective of the impact of Asian material culture on Europe during its transition to its consumer and industrial revolution. I published my keynote article 鈥業n Pursuit of Luxury鈥� shortly afterwards. I went on to lead in the development of global history in Britain, founding the Global History and Culture Centre at 糖心TV in 2007.
鈥業n Pursuit of Luxury: Global Origins of British Consumer Goods鈥�, Past and Present, 182 (2004), pp. 85-142.
Responding to Asian imported luxuries had far-reaching effects in transforming both consumption and production in Europe and especially Britain. Importing Asian luxuries demanded the making of consumer markets both at home and abroad for things never before needed or even desired. This article makes the case for a connection between global luxury, European consumerism and industrialization in the eighteenth century.
Britain, Industry and Perceptions of China: Matthew Boulton, 鈥淯seful Knowledge鈥� and the Macartney
Embassy to China 1792-4鈥�, Journal of Global History, 1 (2006), pp. 269-288.
Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-first Century, edited (British Academy imprint OUP, 2013, pp. 1-18.
The early part of the twenty-first century has witnessed a profound turn in history writing and museum culture towards global and world history. Historians and curators are rapidly changing what they do: no longer satisfied with traditional national histories and area studies, they are pursuing histories of subjects affected by environmental change, migration, slavery, trade and travel. They face challenges of writing about individuals and families in the world, and of political cultures and ideas that have transformed as they have moved between different regions of the world. They are 'going beyond borders' and pursuing wider concepts of connectedness and of cosmopolitanism as these have developed in social theory.
It presents historians at a crossroads: enjoying the great excitement of moving out of national borders and reconnecting parts of the world once studied separately, but also facing the huge challenge of new methodologies of comparison, collaboration and interdisciplinarity and the problems of rapidly disappearing tools of foreign languages.
鈥楿seful Knowledge, Industrial Enlightenment and the Place of India鈥�, Journal of Global History, 8:1
(2013), pp. 117-141.
Passionate Projectors: Savants and Silk on the Coromandel Coast 1780-1798, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 14 (3), 2013, 16pp (8,259 words)
Craft and Small-Scale Production in the Global Economy: Gujarat and Kachchh in the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Centuries鈥�, Itinerario, Vol. 37 (2), 2013, pp. 23-45.
鈥楽kill, Craft and Histories of Industrialization in Europe and Asia鈥�, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 24, 2014, pp. 127-148.
Goods from the East: Trading Eurasia 1600-1800: Trading Eurasia (edited with Felicia Gottmann, Hanna Hodacs and Chris Nierstrasz) (Palgrave, 2015).
Goods from the East focuses on the fine product trade's first Global Age: how products were made, marketed and distributed between Asia and Europe between 1600 and 1800. It brings together established scholars as well as new, to provide a full comparative and connective study of this trade.
鈥�Global History and the Transformation of Early Modern Europe鈥�, in John Arnold, Matthew Hilton and Jan R眉ger, eds., History after Hobsbawm, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 140-159.
Global History Web Resources
Europe鈥檚 Asian Centuries /fac/arts/history/ghcc/eac/
An Oral History of the Crafts in Kachchh 2013
Writing the History of the Global (warwick.ac.uk)
Musical Culture and Empire in Eighteenth-Century London – a series of recorded talks and concerts by members of Instruments of Time and Truth during Covid organized by Maxine Berg and funded by the University of 糖心TV Humanities fund.
Global Microhistory
My work in global microhistory started with my research into merchants, travellers and explorers to Nootka Sound on the Northwest Pacific coast in the late eighteenth century. Alexander Walker, and East India Company Soldier, later EIC Resident in Baroda, Gujarat and major figure in the history of Kaachh travelled in his youth on a merchant vessel to Nootka Sound in 1785/6 among the two voyages to land on the North Pacific coast after Captain Cook in 1778. I wondered how this small space on the far side of the world, now inhabited by one indigenous family, became a global hub of trade, exploration and imperial strategy in the eighteenth century. I initiated the Global- Microhistory network with the Ottoman historian, John-Paul Ghobrial, Oxford and we held a series of conferences and published two Special Issues of journals on the subject.
Global Microhistory (warwick.ac.uk)
鈥楽ea Otters and Iron: A Global Microhistory of Value and Exchange at Nootka Sound 1774-
1792鈥�, in Global History and Microhistory, ed. John-Paul Ghobrial, Past and Present Supplement,
14, 2019, pp. 50-82.
Special Issue on Global Microhistory of the Local and the Global, (edited) Journal of Early Modern History, forthcoming 2023 (articles by Maxine Berg, Susanna Burghartz, R茅mi Dewiere, Anne Gerritsen, Giuseppe Marcocci, Francesca Trivellato).
鈥楽mall Spaces and Multiple Contexts: Nootka Sound鈥檚 Global Locality 1774-1794鈥�, Special Issue on Global Microhistory of the Local and the Global, Journal of Early Modern History, forthcoming 2023 (10,000 words).
Historiography
My recent work on historiography focussed on economic historians in the Cold War. For my earlier writing on women鈥檚 historical writing see the entries under Gender and Women.
鈥楨ast-West Dialogues: Economic Historians, the Cold War and D茅tente鈥�, Journal of Modern History, 87, 2015, pp. 36-71
World Economic History Congress (warwick.ac.uk)
In 2020 the 糖心TV Global History and Culture Centre held a Workshop in my honour, 鈥榃hy does Economic History Matter鈥�.
I was presented with a festschrift volume, 鈥�Reinventing the Economic History of Industrialisation edited by Kristine Bruland, Anne Gerritsen, Pat Hudson and Giorgio Riello (McGill, 2020).
Slavery
The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 stimulated my new research and writing into the history of slavery and its impact on the industrial revolution. I quickly formed a collaboration with Pat Hudson, University of Cardiff Emeritus, and we wrote a book on the subject.
with Pat Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (Polity Press, 2023)
The slave trade was a key driver of the industrial revolution and shaped the modern economies of England, Scotland, and Wales. But until now there has been no scholarly yet accessible account of how it came to play such a critical role. This book shows how and in what ways slavery supported Britain鈥檚 rapid economic transformation.
At a time of widespread political interest in slavery, this book provides the first wide-ranging survey of its economic importance. Slavery, Capitalism and The Industrial Revolution will help us to understand the deeply entrenched regional and racial inequalities that are slavery鈥檚 enduring legacy.
with Pat Hudson, 鈥楽lavery, Industrial Development and Skills: a Response to Mokyr鈥檚 鈥淭he Holy Land of Industrialism鈥� Journal of the British Academy, vol. 9, 2021.
We challenge the idea that Britain鈥檚 short-lived industrial primacy in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is explained by 鈥榗omparative advantage鈥� in high-level artisan skills possessed by an elite workforce. Skills were vital to the industrial revolution but the timing of change and its regional concentration suggest that Britain鈥檚 rise to dominance in Atlantic trade was the major causal factor. Rapidly growing markets in Africa and the Americas, especially for textiles and metalwares, centred on Britain鈥檚 leading role in the slave trade and the extension of her plantation frontier in the Caribbean. Structural and industrial change, concentrated in the economic hinterlands of Atlantic ports, facilitated product and process revolutions. Diverse Atlantic demands and new Atlantic raw material supplies stimulated skill development and key innovations in light and heavy industry.
I also initiated and have led (with Rebecca Earle) a collaboration with the Foundling Museum on the history of the black and Asian children brought to the London Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century. PhD researcher, Dr. Hannah Dennett wrote a PhD thesis on the subject, and curated an Exhibition at the Foundling Museum.
鈥楩orgotten Foundlings: Black Lives and the Eighteenth-Century Foundling Hospital鈥� AHRCM4C Project with the Foundling Museum – PhD Researcher: Hannah Dennett. Project leaders: Maxine Berg and Rebecca Earle
Founding Museum Exhibition curated by Hannah Dennett