Robert C. Allen

The gap between the rich and the poor can be vast. Robert C. Allen considers the main factors that contribute to this gap, looking at the interconnections between economic growth, culture, technology, and income distribution. Exploring the historical processes that have created the unequal world of today, he takes a global look at wealth worldwide.

Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction

A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution

Farm to Factory

Douglas Gomery

Theory and Practice

Film History

To Be Continued... explores the world's most popular form of television drama; the soap opera. From Denver to Delhi, Moscow to Manchester, audiences eagerly await the next episode of As the World Turns, The Rich Also Weep or Eastenders. But the popularity of soap operas in Britain and the US pales in comparison to the role that they play in media cultures in other parts of the world. To Be Continued... investigates both the cultural specificity of television soap operas and their reception in other cultures, covering soap production and soap watching in the U.S., Asia, Europe, Australia and Latin America. The contributors consider the nature of soap as a media text, the history of the serial narrative as a form, and the role of the soap opera in the development of feminist media criticism. To Be Continued... presents the first scholarly examination of soap opera as global media phenomenon.

Soap Operas Around the World

To Be Continued...

Tommy Bengtsson

Martin Dribe

Why did Europe experience industrialisation and modern economic growth before China, India or Japan? This is one of the most fundamental questions in Economic History and one that has provoked intense debate. The main concern of this book is to determine when the gap in living standards between the East and the West emerged. The established view, dating back to Adam Smith, is that the gap emerged long before the Industrial Revolution, perhaps thousands of years ago. While this view has been called into question - and many of the explanations for it greatly undermined - the issue demands much more empirical research than has yet been undertaken. How did the standard of living in Europe and Asia compare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The present book proposes an answer by considering evidence of three sorts. The first is economic, focusing on income, food production, wages, and prices. The second is demographic, comparing heights, life expectancy and other demographic indicators. The third combines the economic and demographic by investigating the demographic vulnerability to short-term economic stress. The contributions show the highly complex and diverse pattern of the standard of living in the pre-industrial period. The general picture emerging is not one of a great divergence between East and West, but instead one of considerable similarities. These similarities not only pertain to economic aspects of standard of living but also to demography and the sensitivity to economic fluctuations. In addition to these similarities, there were also pronounced regional differences within the East and within the West - regional differences that in many cases were larger than the average differences between Europe and Asia. This clearly highlights the importance of analysing several dimensions of the standard of living, as well as the danger of neglecting regional, social, and household specific differences when assessing the level of well-being in the past.

New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe

Living Standards in the Past

The 'Industrial Revolution' was a pivotal point in British history that occurred between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries and led to far reaching transformations of society. With the advent of revolutionary manufacturing technology productivity boomed. Machines were used to spin and weave cloth, steam engines were used to provide reliable power, and industry was fed by the construction of the first railways, a great network of arteries feeding the factories. Cities grew as people shifted from agriculture to industry and commerce. Hand in hand with the growth of cities came rising levels of pollution and disease. Many people lost their jobs to the new machinery, whilst working conditions in the factories were grim and pay was low. As the middle classes prospered, social unrest ran through the working classes, and the exploitation of workers led to the growth of trade unions and protest movements. In this Very Short Introduction, Robert C. Allen analyzes the key features of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the spread of industrialization to other countries. He considers the factors that combined to enable industrialization at this time, including Britain's position as a global commercial empire, and discusses the changes in technology and business organization, and their impact on different social classes and groups. Introducing the 'winners' and the 'losers' of the Industrial Revolution, he looks at how the changes were reflected in evolving government policies, and what contribution these made to the economic transformation. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

Why did the industrial revolution take place in eighteenth-century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? In this convincing new account Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows that in Britain wages were high and capital and energy cheap in comparison to other countries in Europe and Asia. As a result, the breakthrough technologies of the industrial revolution - the steam engine, the cotton mill, and the substitution of coal for wood in metal production - were uniquely profitable to invent and use in Britain. The high wage economy of pre-industrial Britain also fostered industrial development since more people could afford schooling and apprenticeships. It was only when British engineers made these new technologies more cost-effective during the nineteenth century that the industrial revolution would spread around the world.

The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

Linda Williams

Ana M. Lopez

John Belton

Richard Abel

Noel Carroll

Naomi Greene

Ien Ang

Christopher Orr

Jean-Loup Bourget

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

Pam Cook

Alan Casty

Charles Affron

Christian Viviani

Chuck Kleinhans

Charlotte Brunsdon

Cawelti, John G.

Gerould, Daniel

Brooks, Peter

Elsaesser, Thomas

Ruth McCormick

Ellen Seiter

A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama

Imitations of Life

Since its original publication in 1987, Channels of Discourse has provided the most comprehensive consideration of commercial television, drawing on insights provided by the major strands of contemporary criticism: semiotics, narrative theory, reception theory, genre theory, ideological analysis, psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, and British cultural studies. The second edition features a new introduction by Robert Allen that includes a discussion of the political economy of commercial television. Two new essays have been added--one an assessment of postmodernism and television, the other an analysis of convergence and divergence among the essays--and the original essays have been substantially revised and updated with an international audience in mind. Sixty-one new television stills illustrate the text. Each essay lays out the general tenets of its particular approach, discusses television as an object of analysis within that critical framework, and provides extended examples of the types of analysis produced by that critical approach. Case studies range from Rescue 911 and Twin Peaks to soap operas, music videos, game shows, talk shows, and commericals. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled suggests new ways of understanding relationships among television programs, between viewing pleasure and narrative structure, and between the world in front of the television set and that represented on the screen. The collection also addresses the qualities of popular television that traditional aesthetics and quantitative media research have failed to treat satisfactorily, including its seriality, mass production, and extraordinary popularity. The contributors are Robert C. Allen, Jim Collins, Jane Feuer, John Fiske, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, James Hay, E. Ann Kaplan, Sarah Kozloff, Ellen Seiter, and Mimi White.

Television and Contemporary Criticism

Channels of Discourse, Reassembled

The Industrial Revolution was a pivotal point in British history that occurred between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries and led to far reaching transformations of society. With the advent of revolutionary manufacturing technology productivity boomed. Machines were used to spin and weave cloth, steam engines were used to provide reliable power, and industry was fed by the construction of the first railways, a great network of arteries feeding the factories. Cities grew as people shifted from agriculture to industry and commerce. Hand in hand with the growth of cities came rising levels of pollution and disease. Many people lost their jobs to the new machinery, whilst working conditions in the factories were grim and pay was low. As the middle classes prospered, social unrest ran through the working classes, and the exploitation of workers led to the growth of trade unions and protest movements. In this Very Short Introduction, Robert C. Allen analyzes the key features of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the spread of industrialization to other countries. He considers the factors that combined to enable industrialization at this time, including Britain's position as a global commercial empire, and discusses the changes in technology and business organization, and their impact on different social classes and groups. Introducing the "winners" and the "losers" of the Industrial Revolution, he looks at how the changes were reflected in evolving government policies, and what contribution these made to the economic transformation. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Industrial Revolution: a Very Short Introduction

To say that history's greatest economic experiment--Soviet communism--was also its greatest economic failure is to say what many consider obvious. Here, in a startling reinterpretation, Robert Allen argues that the USSR was one of the most successful developing economies of the twentieth century. He reaches this provocative conclusion by recalculating national consumption and using economic, demographic, and computer simulation models to address the "what if" questions central to Soviet history. Moreover, by comparing Soviet performance not only with advanced but with less developed countries, he provides a meaningful context for its evaluation. Although the Russian economy began to develop in the late nineteenth century based on wheat exports, modern economic growth proved elusive. But growth was rapid from 1928 to the 1970s--due to successful Five Year Plans. Notwithstanding the horrors of Stalinism, the building of heavy industry accelerated growth during the 1930s and raised living standards, especially for the many peasants who moved to cities. A sudden drop in fertility due to the education of women and their employment outside the home also facilitated growth. While highlighting the previously underemphasized achievements of Soviet planning, Farm to Factory also shows, through methodical analysis set in fluid prose, that Stalin's worst excesses--such as the bloody collectivization of agriculture--did little to spur growth. Economic development stagnated after 1970, as vital resources were diverted to the military and as a Soviet leadership lacking in original thought pursued wasteful investments.

Robert C. Allen

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