BiblioVault - Books about Industrial Transformation

The End of Cheap Labour?

Industrial Transformation and "Social Upgrading" in China

Florian Butollo

Campus Verlag, 2014

The Chinese government and international observers argue that China’s economy must overcome its excessive dependence on exports if substantial growth in domestic consumption is to be achieved and sustained in the future. But this shift can only occur if China also lessens its reliance on cheap migrant labor and encourages investment in its own labor force.

In The End of Cheap Labour?, Florian Butollo investigates the recent transformation of the garment and LED lighting industries in the Pearl River Delta, China’s largest industrial hub. He reveals that industrial upgrading rarely supports improvements in working conditions and the basic employment pattern; and this failure of “social upgrading” threatens to undermine the desired rebalancing of the Chinese economy. Butollo demonstrates that the implementation of collective labor rights remains an important obstacle in the future of the Chinese growth model.

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Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South

Edited by Susanna Delfino & Michele Gillespie

University of Missouri Press, 2005

Covering the late colonial age to World War I and beyond, this collection of essays places the economic history of the American South in an international light by establishing useful comparisons with the larger Atlantic and world economy. In an attempt to dispel long-lasting myths about the South, the essays analyze the economic evolution of the South since the slave era. From this perspective, the conception of a backward, wholly agricultural antebellum South occupied only by wealthy planters, poor whites, and contented slaves has finally given way to one of economic and social dynamism as well as regional prosperity.

In a coherent and cohesive progression of subjects, these essays show that the South had been deeply enmeshed in the Atlantic economy since the colonial period and, after the Civil War, retained distinctive needs that caused increasing departure from the course northerners adopted on matters of political economy. This comparative approach also helps explain the motivations behind the political choices made by the South as an eminently export-oriented region.

This book shows that the South was not slower to develop with respect to industrialization than either the majority of the northern states, especially in the West, or the countries of Western Europe. In fact, the apparently disappointing performance of the New South’s economy appears to be the result of more pervasive and largely uncontrollable trends that affected the national as well as the international economy. Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South makes an important contribution to the economic history of the South and to recent efforts to place American history in a more international context.

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Petrochemical Planet

Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation

Alice Mah

Duke University Press, 2023

In Petrochemical Planet Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry as it faces the existential threats of climate change and environmental activism. Drawing on research from high-level industry meetings, petrochemical plant tours, and polluted communities, Mah juxtaposes the petrochemical industry’s destructive corporate worldviews with environmental justice struggles in the United States, China, and Europe. She argues that amid intensifying public pressures, a profound planetary industrial transformation is underway that is challenging the reigning age of plastics and fossil fuels. This challenge comes from what Mah calls multiscalar activism—a form of collective resistance that spans local, regional, national, and planetary sites and scales and addresses the interconnected issues of environmental justice, climate, pollution, health, extraction, land rights, workers’ rights, systemic racism, and toxic colonialism. Reflecting on the obstacles and openings for critical interventions in the petrochemical industry, Mah offers important insights into the possibilities for resistance and for developing alternatives to the reliance on fossil fuels.

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Triumphant Capitalism

Henry Clay Frick and the Industrial Transformation of America

Kenneth Warren

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000

A detailed, carefully wrought business biography of Henry Clay Frick, one of the leading entrepreneurs in American heavy industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kenneth Warren has provided not only insight into the life of Henry Clay Frick, but a major contribution to our understanding of the history of the basic industries, the shaping of society, locality, and region - and thereby of laying the foundations for the value systems and landscapes of present-day America.

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