The history of Qing palace eunuchs is defined by a tension between the role eunuchs were meant to play and the life they intended to live. This study tells the story of how a complicated and much-mali
Just as the Industrial Revolution in Britain suggested a promise of abundance, David Ricardo, Robert Malthus, and their colleagues formalized classical political economy with its emphasis on scarcity, self-interest, and private accumulation of capital. At the same time, Robert Owen took a different path arguing that the new technologies open a new world. In effect, his ideas turn classical political economy on its head. Building this new social science, Owen emphasizes abundance, public spiritedness, and communal accumulation of capital. Although the history of the cooperative movement is well documented, the social psychology, architecture, and logic of its economics stand in need of reappraisal. This book describes, often restates, and in places reconstructs the social science of British cooperative writers-from Robert Owen, through William Thompson and Anna Doyle Wheeler, J.S. Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, the Christian Socialists, the consumer cooperative movement, the Women's Coop
Things which we regard as the everyday objects of consumption (and hence re-purchase), and essential to any decent, civilised lifestyle, have not always been so: in former times, everyday objects would have passed from one generation to another, without anyone dreaming of acquiring new ones. How, therefore, have people in the modern world become 'prisoners of objects', as Rousseau put it? The celebrated French cultural historian Daniel Roche answers this fundamental question using insights from economics, politics, demography and geography, as well as his own extensive historical knowledge. Professor Roche places familiar objects and commodities - houses, clothes, water - in their wider historical and anthropological contexts, and explores the origins of some of the daily furnishings of modern life. A History of Everyday Things is a pioneering essay that sheds light on the origins of the consumer society and its social and political repercussions, and thereby the birth of the modern w
This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines, featuring contributions from leading humanities and social science scholars who detail the narratives