Book picks similar to
The First Industrial Nation: The Economic History of Britain 1700 - 1914 by Peter Mathias
history
economics
economic-history
non-fiction
Medieval Europe, 395-1270
Gabriel Monod - 1903
We have in particular given a large place to the rôle and to the history of the Church which dominates all this period, and which has been ordinarily so neglected in our schoolbooks, and have sought to make clear how France obtained in the thirteenth century a sort of political and intellectual hegemony in Europe. We hope those who read will understand what were the great ideas and directive tendencies which determined the historical evolution of the Middle Ages. We have always kept in mind in writing the conclusion to which we were advancing." - Charles Bémont & Gabriel MonodContents: The Roman Empire at the End of the Fourth Century. The Barbarians. The Germanic Invasions – The Vandals, The Visigoths, and the Huns (376-476). The Germanic Invasions – The Ostrogoths. The Germanic Invasions – The Barbarians in Gaul – Clovis. The Frankish Kingdom from 511 to 639. Institutions of Gaul after the Invasions. The Roman Empire of the East in the Sixth Century. The Last Invasions and the Papacy – The Lombards and Gregory the Great – The Anglo-Saxons and Monasticism. The Arabs – Mohammed. Arabian Empire – Conquests and Civilization. The Fainéant Kings – Foundation of the Carolingian Dynasty – Charlemagne. Empire of the Franks – Carolingian Customs and Institutions. The Carolingian Decadence, 814-888. The Last Carolingians – Invasions of the Saracens, Hungarians, and Norsemen – Origin of Feudalism. The Feudal System. Germany and Italy (888-1056). Emperor and Pope – Church Reform – Gregory VII. The Guelfs and Hohenstaufen – Alexander III. and Frederick I. Barbarossa. End of the Hohenstaufen – Victory of the Papacy over the Empire. The Christian and Mussulman Orient from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. The Crusades. The Country Districts and Cities of France - Emancipation of Peasants and Bourgeois. French Royalty (987-1154). French Royalty (1154-1270). Institutions of Capetian Royalty. England from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Century. Continental Europe. The Roman Church in the Thirteenth Century. The Church and Heresies. Christian and Feudal Civilization – Instruction And Sciences – Literature And Arts – Worship. General Summary.
The Roaring Twenties: A Captivating Guide to a Period of Dramatic Social and Political Change, a False Sense of Prosperity, and Its Impact on the Great Depression
Captivating History - 2018
Like so many good stories, it got its start from a time of great turmoil and ended in a dramatic fashion. What happened between 1920 and 1929 has passed beyond history and has become legend. The lessons of the 1920s are still relevant today. Many of the debates and issues of the era are still part of the national conversation. Economic policies, consumer behaviors and mass culture of the 1920s are reflected in our culture almost 100 years later. By understanding the past, we can better prepare for the future and this new captivating history book is all about giving you that knowledge. This book includes topics such as:
World War One and the 1920s
Fear of the Other
Old Causes Finishing Business
The Cost of Prohibition
A New World
African-Americans
Politics and Policies
How Did It All End?
And much, much more!
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The Making of Henry VIII (Uncovering the Tudors)
Marie Louise Bruce - 2021
To what extent did King Henry VIII’s upbringing shape him into the tyrannical figure we know today? This concise, well-researched analysis sheds light on a little-known period of the infamous monarch’s life.
Maralinga: The Chilling Expose of Our Secret Nuclear Shame and Betrayal of Our Troops and Country
Frank Walker - 2014
The treachery is chilling. The fallout ongoing.This edition contains a new author note with shocking new material that has come to light as a result of the groundbreaking original publication.Investigative journalist Frank Walker's
Maralinga
is a must-read true story of the abuse of our servicemen, scientists treating the Australian population as lab rats and politicians sacrificing their own people in the pursuit of power.During the Menzies era, with the blessing of the Prime Minister, the British government exploded twelve atomic bombs on Australian soil. RAAF pilots were ordered to fly into nuclear mushroom clouds, soldiers told to walk into radioactive ground zero, sailors retrieved highly contaminated debris - none of them aware of the dangers they faced.But the betrayal didn't end with these servicemen. Secret monitoring stations were set up around the country to measure radiation levels and a clandestine decades-long project stole bones from dead babies to see how much fallout had contaminated their bodies - their grieving parents were never told. This chilling expose drawn from extensive research and interviews with surviving veterans reveals the betrayal of our troops and our country.'An amazing tale ? utterly gripping, it reads like a thriller' - Jon Faine,
ABC Radio Melbourne
'This book will contribute to a much greater awareness and perhaps much more action on this issue' - Fran Kelly,
ABC Radio National
'Walker demonstrates powerfully why, regardless of the context in which the testing took place, the emotional legacy of Maralinga will linger in the Australian psyche, just as do Gallipoli, Bodyline and Singapore. The cost in terms of damage to health, the environment and public trust in government will remain with us for generations to come' - The Australian'Shocking revelations?' - Margaret Throsby, Midday Interview, ABC Classic FM'An extraordinary story ? there are things here that would make your hair stand on end' - Philip Clark,
ABC Radio Canberra
'This book should be on the school syllabus' - Andrew O'Keefe,
Weekend Sunrise
Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress
Jan Morris - 1973
Index. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
When Money Dies: The Nightmare Of The Weimar Hyper Inflation
Adam Fergusson - 1975
In 1923, with its currency effectively worthless (the exchange rate in December of that year was one dollar to 4,200,000,000,000 marks), the German republic was all but reduced to a barter economy. Expensive cigars, artworks, and jewels were routinely exchanged for staples such as bread; a cinema ticket could be bought for a lump of coal; and a bottle of paraffin for a silk shirt. People watched helplessly as their life savings disappeared and their loved ones starved. Germany’s finances descended into chaos, with severe social unrest in its wake.
Money may no longer be physically printed and distributed in the voluminous quantities of 1923. However, “quantitative easing,” that modern euphemism for surreptitious deficit financing in an electronic era, can no less become an assault on monetary discipline. Whatever the reason for a country’s deficit necessity or profligacy, unwillingness to tax or blindness to expenditure it is beguiling to suppose that if the day of reckoning is postponed economic recovery will come in time to prevent higher unemployment or deeper recession. What if it does not? Germany in 1923 provides a vivid, compelling, sobering moral tale.
London: The Biography
Peter Ackroyd - 2000
In this unusual and engaging work, Ackroyd brings the reader through time into the city whose institutions and idiosyncrasies have permeated much of his works of fiction and nonfiction. Peter Ackroyd sees London as a living, breathing organism, with its own laws of growth and change. Reveling in the city’s riches as well as its raucousness, the author traces thematically its growth from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Anecdotal, insightful, and wonderfully entertaining, London is animated by Ackroyd’s concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, as well as by what he describes as the peculiar “echoic” quality of London, whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.London confirms Ackroyd’s status as what one critic has called “our age’s greatest London imagination.”
The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
Charles R. Morris - 2005
Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. They were the giants of the Gilded Age, a moment of riotous growth that established America as the richest, most inventive, and most productive country on the planet.Acclaimed author Charles R. Morris vividly brings the men and their times to life. The ruthlessly competitive Carnegie, the imperial Rockefeller, and the provocateur Gould were obsessed with progress, experiment, and speed. They were balanced by Morgan, the gentleman businessman, who fought, instead, for a global trust in American business. Through their antagonism and their verve, they built an industrial behemoth—and a country of middle-class consumers. The Tycoons tells the incredible story of how these four determined men wrenched the economy into the modern age, inventing a nation of full economic participation that could not have been imagined only a few decades earlier.
Princess Helena
John Van der Kiste - 2013
A steady, dependable young woman, known as ‘Lenchen’ within the family, she was particularly ‘useful’ to her demanding and recently widowed mother, who could not bear to lose her to a marriage which would oblige her to move and live abroad with her husband. In 1866 she married Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, a kindly but penniless bachelor fifteen years older than her. Despite the difference in ages, it was the only marriage among the Queen’s children in which both partners lived long enough to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. For nearly sixty years Helena was a tireless supporter of good causes, particularly in the field of nursing and education. This concise biography examines her life, work and relationships with her family.
The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China
Julia Lovell - 2011
'On the outside, [the foreigners] seem intractable, but inside they are cowardly...Although there have been a few ups-and-downs, the situation as a whole is under control.' In October 1839, a few months after the Chinese Imperial Commissioner, Lin Zexu, dispatched these confident words to his emperor, a Cabinet meeting in Windsor voted to fight Britain's first Opium War (1839-42) with China. The conflict turned out to be rich in tragicomedy: in bureaucratic fumblings, military missteps, political opportunism and collaboration. Yet over the past hundred and seventy years, this strange tale of misunderstanding, incompetence and compromise has become the founding myth of modern Chinese nationalism: the start of China's heroic struggle against a Western conspiracy to destroy the country with opium and gunboat diplomacy. "The Opium War" is both the story of modern China - starting from this first conflict with the West - and an analysis of the country's contemporary self-image. It explores how China's national myths mould its interactions with the outside world, how public memory is spun to serve the present; and how delusion and prejudice have bedevilled its relationship with the modern West.
Grand Pursuit: A History of Economic Genius
Sylvia Nasar - 2011
It’s the epic story of the making of modern economics, and of how economics rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands rather than in Fate. Nasar’s account begins with Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew observing and publishing the condition of the poor majority in mid-nineteenth-century London, the richest and most glittering place in the world. This was a new pursuit. She describes the often heroic efforts of Marx, Engels, Alfred Marshall, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and the American Irving Fisher to put those insights into action—with revolutionary consequences for the world. From the great John Maynard Keynes to Schumpeter, Hayek, Keynes’s disciple Joan Robinson, the influential American economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Freedman, and India’s Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, she shows how the insights of these activist thinkers transformed the world—from one city, London, to the developed nations in Europe and America, and now to the entire planet. In Nasar’s dramatic narrative of these discoverers we witness men and women responding to personal crises, world wars, revolutions, economic upheavals, and each other’s ideas to turn back Malthus and transform the dismal science into a triumph over mankind’s hitherto age-old destiny of misery and early death. This idea, unimaginable less than 200 years ago, is a story of trial and error, but ultimately transcendent, as it is rendered here in a stunning and moving narrative.
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
Daniel Yergin - 1991
This struggle has shaken the world economy, dictated the outcome of wars, and transformed the destiny of men and nations.The Prize is as much a history of the twentieth century as of the oil industry itself. The canvas of history is enormous -- from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm.
The History of Money
Jack Weatherford - 1997
In his most widely appealing book yet, one of today's leading authors of popular anthropology looks at the intriguing history and peculiar nature of money, tracing our relationship with it from the time when primitive men exchanged cowrie shells to the imminent arrival of the all-purpose electronic cash card.
Engineers of Victory: The Making of the War Machine That Defeated the Nazis
Paul Kennedy - 2012
The Turn of the Tide is a fascinating nuts-and-bolts account of the strategic factors that led to Allied victory. Kennedy reveals how the leaders’ grand strategy was carried out by the ordinary soldiers, scientists, engineers, and businessmen responsible for realizing their commanders’ visions of success.In January 1943, FDR and Churchill convened in Casablanca and established the Allied objectives for the war: to defeat the Nazi blitzkrieg; to control the Atlantic sea lanes and the air over western and central Europe; to take the fight to the European mainland; and to end Japan’s imperialism. Astonishingly, a little over a year later, these ambitious goals had nearly all been accomplished. With riveting, tactical detail, The Turn of the Tide reveals how.Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar “as small as a soup plate,” and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe’s; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan.The story of World War II is often told as a grand narrative, as if it were fought by supermen or decided by fate. Here Kennedy uncovers the real heroes of the war, highlighting for the first time the creative strategies, tactics, and organizational decisions that made the lofty Allied objectives into a successful reality. In an even more significant way, The Turn of the Tide has another claim to our attention, for it restores “the middle level of war” to its rightful place in history.From the Hardcover edition.
Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy
Matt Stoller - 2019
A concentration of power, whether in the hands of a military dictator or a JP Morgan, was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. This idea stretched back to the country’s founding. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse. They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal. In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today’s bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment. The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller’s study will only grow more relevant as time passes. Building upon his viral article in The Atlantic, “How the Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul,” Stoller illustrates in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy.