In 1850 the Industrial Revolution came to an end. In 1851 the Great Exhibition illustrated to the whole world the supremacy of industrial England. For the next twenty years Britain reigned supreme. From around 1870 Britain began to decline. Britain is now a second rate power with strong memories of its former supremacy. The above five sentences summarise a common view of the sequencing of Britain’s rise and relative fall, a stereotype that is challenged and modified in the essays of The Golden Age. By concentrating on central aspects of social and industrial change authors expose the underpinnings of supremacy, its unsung underside, its tarnished gold. Major themes cover industrial and technological change, social institutions and gender relations in a period during which industry and industrialism were equally celebrated and nurtured. Against this background it is difficult to argue for any sudden decline of energy, assets or institution, nor for any significant move from an industrial society to one in which a hearty manufacturing was replaced by commerce and land, sensibility and artifice.

This book challenges the wide-ranging generalizations that dominate the literature on the impact of export-led growth upon Latin America during the first export era. The contributors to this volume contest conventional approaches, stemming from structuralism and dependency theory, which portray a rather negative view of the impact of nineteenth-century globalization upon Latin America. It has been considered that, as a result of the role of Latin American countries as providers of raw materials produced in enclaves dominated by foreign capital, their participation in the world economy has had adverse consequences for their long-term development. This volume addresses a representative sample of countries with varied initial conditions and resource endowments, a diverse productive specialization, as well as different degrees of integration to the world economy. This allows a direct comparison among the different experiences within the region, which in turn enables a more nuanced understanding of the contribution of exports to economic growth and economic modernization. Seven national case studies are presented – Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Mexico and Bolivia – which offer an insight into the successes of a region traditionally viewed as disadvantaged by globalization and export-led growth. Winner of the Vicens Vives prize for the best economic history book granted by the Spanish Economic History Association.

The information age has become a reality, and has brought with it many implications for public administration. New ICT's offer new opportunities for government and governing, but at the same time they pose challenges in some key areas of public administration, like trust, or the idea of checks and balances. This book is an examination of the developments and effects of ICT in public administration over the last 10 to 15 years. It represents a re-visiting of the 1998 IOS Press publication ‘Public Administration in an Information Age: A Handbook’. As a point of departure, the authors of this new book have chosen the speed of the succession of theoretical approaches, represented by the 'phase of theories' which has appeared since 1998. This approach, which reflects that of the 1998 handbook, avoids the impression of technological determinism and provides an opportunity to focus on the phases of theory and technological developments. The book is divided into five sections. The first section examines key issues, and the second focuses on aspects of democracy. In the third section, the focus shifts towards structural conditions; the conditions that public administration has to meet in order to maintain its effectiveness and its legitimacy in the information age. Section four addresses some objects of implementation, like IT-inspired redesign, HRM and the phenomenon of Street Level Bureaucrats. Finally, the last section offers some concluding thoughts.

The present volume is a Festschrift in honor of the distinguished scholar in Late Byzantine, post-Byzantine and Cretan Renaissance studies I. Mavromatis. The title Kalligraphos is indicative of the foundations of his scholarship, which lie in the fields of paleography and early printing. With manuscripts and early printed books as the primary material of his studies, Professor Mavromatis has produced several major works in the fields of Byzantine philology, Cretan Renaissance literature (especially Erotorcritos) and late Byzantine vernacular poetry. This volume includes a short preface and twenty-four articles by senior and younger scholars, former colleagues, collaborators, and students of Professor Mavromatis. The articles are loosely arranged in chronological order of their subject matter and treat issues ranging from Byzantine historiography going back to the 4th century CE to post-Byzantine Cretan poetry of the 17th century. This philological kaleidoscope features new editions and interpretations of hitherto unknown or little-known poems and texts. The volume is intended for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students and the general readership interested in Byzantine and post-Byzantine literature.

The struggles and achievements of forty-six notable women artists of the early modern period, as documented by their contemporaries, are uniquely brought together in this anthology. The life stories presented here are foundational texts for the history of art, but since most are found only in rare volumes and few have been translated into English, until now they have been generally inaccessible to many scholars. Originally published in biographical compendia such as Vasari's Lives of the Artists, the writings included here document not only the lives of relatively well known women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola, but also those who have languished in obscurity, like Anna Waser and Li Yin. Each life story is preceded by a brief introduction to the artist as well as to her biographer, and the texts themselves are annotated to provide necessary clarification. Beyond their documentary value, these stories provide fascinating insight as to how men commonly characterized women artists as exceptions to their sex, and attempted to explain their presence in the male-dominated realm of art. The introductory chapter to the book explores this intriguing gender dynamic and elucidates some of the strategies and historical context that factored into the composition of these lives. The volume includes an appended index to women artists' life stories in biographical compendia of the period

The introduction of decimal currency in the UK and Ireland in February 1971 is a subject strangely neglected by historians of the period, despite it being a change which affected the daily life of everyone living in the British Isles at the time. Most histories of the 1960s and 1970s treat it as a mere footnote, an administrative reform of little significance, or ignore it altogether. What commentary there has been tends to be ill-informed, seeing decimalisation either as a harbinger of creeping Europeanisation or the trigger for the inflation of the mid-1970s or both. 50 years after “D-Day” there has been no comprehensive historical study of decimalisation, other than an official account by the secretary to the Decimal Currency Board, Noel Moore, in 1973. This ground-breaking work debunks the myths around the decimalisation project, and demonstrates, through an extensive examination of official documents and contemporary media reports, that the reform was an essentially conservative one. Far from ditching tradition in favour of ‘Euro-normality’, by retaining the pound as the ‘heaviest’ currency in the developed world, the UK government, keen to maintain the supposed prestige of Sterling effectively defended British exceptionalism. Only in the Irish Republic was the issue of compatibility with the currencies of Western Europe seriously considered. In examining the debates around decimalisation in Britain and Ireland from the mid-1950s through to 1971, this book fills a gap in the historiography, and through the prism of decimalisation, nuances our understanding of both the internal politics of the UK and Ireland, and relationships with Europe and the Commonwealth.

The Yankees and New York baseball entered a golden age between 1949 and 1964, a period during which the city was represented in all but one World Series. While the Yankees dominated, however, the years were not so golden for the rest of baseball. In The Postwar Yankees: Baseball's Golden Age Revisited, David G. Surdam deconstructs this idyllic period to show that while the Yankees piled on pennants and World Series titles through the 1950s, Major League Baseball attendance consistently declined and gate-revenue disparity widened through the mid-1950s. Contrary to popular belief, the era was already experiencing many problems that fans of today's game bemoan, including a competitive imbalance and callous owners who ran the league like a cartel. Fans also found aging, decrepit stadiums ill-equipped for the burgeoning automobile culture, while television and new forms of leisure competed for their attention. Through an economist's lens, Surdam brings together historical documents and off-the-field numbers to reconstruct the period and analyze the roots of the age's enduring mythology, examining why the Yankees and other New York teams were consistently among baseball's elite and how economic and social forces set in motion during this golden age shaped the sport into its modern incarnation.