Abstract:
The classic case of Industrial Revolution – the mechanization of textile production in northern Britain between about 1760 and 1840 – has been the subject of investigation from economic and labor historians, demographic and social historians, local and global historians, sub-disciplines of all stripes. This new treatment of familiar events is nonetheless the first to make use of the theories and approaches developed in the history of technology. Technological change is about more than inventions. Historians of technology challenge technological determinism by placing technical change within its context, and I trace the causes and effects of textile industrialization from government protection and global competition to plantation and imperial expansion. This classic case of rapid and revolutionary technological change ranges from the north of England to slavery, cotton plantations, the Anglo-Indian trade and beyond, and places technological change at the center of world history.
Bio:
Barbara Hahn received her BA from St. John’s College-Annapolis in 1988, her MA from the University of Cincinnati in 2000, and her PhD from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2006. Since that date she has served on the faculty of the History Department of Texas Tech University, where she is now an associate professor. She is the author of Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937 (2011) and, with Bruce E. Baker, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (2016). She has just completed Technology in the Industrial Revolution for Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2020), research supported by a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship at the University of Leeds (#628722, “Rethinking Textiles,” PI Prof. Regina Lee Blaszczyk), and is also finishing a stint as associate editor of the journal Technology and Culture. She is one of four collaborators on Moving Crops and the Scales of History, a project and book manuscript supported by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin that is attempting to re-write global history and challenge its teleological narratives, using history-of-technology methods and agriculture for its case studies.