Berg, Maxine 1950-

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BERG, Maxine 1950-

PERSONAL:

Born 1950.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry, Warwickshire CV4 7AL, England. E-mail—[email protected]

CAREER:

University of Warwick, Coventry, Warwickshire, England, professor of history and director of the Warwick Eighteenth-Century Centre.

MEMBER:

Global Economic History Network, British Academy (fellow), Royal Historical Society (fellow), Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences (fellow), Economic History Society, Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica F. Datini, Prato (member of the executive board).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Research grants, Leverhulme Foundation, 2002-05, for "Research Interchange on Cultures of Commerce and Invention, 1550-1850," and 2004-07, for "Selling Consumption: Advertising and the Trade Card in the Eighteenth Century"; Guggenheim Fellowship, 2003-04, for "Global Origins of British Consumer Goods"; research grant, Rothschild Foundation, 2004-06.

WRITINGS:

The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815-1848, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1980.

(Editor, with Pat Hudson and Michael Sonenscher) Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1983.

The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain, 1700-1820, Barnes & Noble (Totowa, NJ), 1985, new edition, Routledge (New York, NY), 1995.

(With others) Französische Revolution und politische Ökonomie: Vorträge: Gehalten anlässlich des Kolloquiums am 27 und 28 Mai 1988 im Studienzentrum Karl-Marx-Haus Trier, Karl-Marx-Haus (Trier, Germany), 1989.

(Editor) Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, Barnes & Noble Books (Savage, MD), 1990.

(Editor) Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe, Routledge (New York, NY), 1991, 2nd edition, 1994.

A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889-1940, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor, with Kristine Bruland) Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives, Edward Elgar (Northampton, MA), 1998.

(Editor, with Helen Clifford) Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850, Manchester University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor, with Elizabeth Eger) Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods, Palgrave (New York, NY), 2003.

Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2005.

(Contributor) Jeff Horn and Len Rosenbrand, editors, Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (Cambridge, MA), 2006.

Contributor to scholarly journals, including Economic History Review and History Today.

SIDELIGHTS:

Maxine Berg is an economic historian with a particular interest in the role of common consumers, average workers, and small-time manufacturers during the Industrial Revolution. In contrast to many economists, who take an almost mathematical view of the process of industrialization, Berg "insist[s] on the variety of particularity of historical experience," Reed Geiger noted in the Journal of Modern History. In her work, Geiger continued, "what have generally been seen as secondary and second-rate industries, organizational forms, techniques, and labor groups emerge as the defining characteristics of the Industrial Revolution."

Berg's first book to receive widespread critical attention was 1985's The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain, 1700-1820, a title that has continued to be a classic in its revised 1995 edition. The book reinterprets the early days of the "Industrial Revolution," showing that industrialization was not an inevitable march of technological progress. Instead, Berg illustrates just how many methods of manufacturing were used between 1700 and 1820, including unmechanized sweatshops, large artisanal workshops, and domestic manufacturing, in addition to the mechanized factories that have typically been seen as the driver of the Industrial Revolution. Berg also examines the role that women and children, who made up a significant portion of the manufacturing workforce, played in the eighteenth-century British economy. "The work presumes a strong immersion in the traditional interpretations and descriptions of British industrialization, against which the variety she demonstrates can sing," Ann Kussmaul noted in a review of the 1985 edition of the book for the Business History Review. Berg "has woven many historio-graphical strands into a pattern far more complex than any early Lancashire power loom would have allowed," Kussmaul continued, "and compared to which the more conventional general interpretations are made to look like so much plain cloth."

Berg has also edited several volumes on the history of the Industrial Revolution, including Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe and Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850. The latter book collects a series of essays on the culture of consumption in Western European countries, particularly Britain and France, before and during the period of industrialization. As Berg and Clifford explain in their introduction, the essays in Consumersand Luxury draw on contemporary historical sources to examine why people consumed the luxury items that they did and what their choices meant in the context of the society of the time. "These diverse essays raise many questions that will prove stimulating for a range of students and scholars," Lesley Miller wrote in the Business History Review.

Berg is also the author of a biography of Eileen Power, a pioneering early-twentieth-century scholar of history who was one of the first to advocate for examining the way that economic and social forces have historically acted upon ordinary men and women. In A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889-1940, Berg sketches Power's unusual life, in which she went from being the daughter of a bankrupt stockbroker to one of the more prominent dons at Cambridge University. "By exploring these events and graciously calling to memory the life and work of Eileen Power, Berg gives us a biography that is absorbing as social commentary and as, simply, story," Elaine Clark wrote in a review for the Journal of Modern History. Berg also argues that Power's contributions to the study of history, which some feel have faded from view since Power's premature death in 1940, should continue to be celebrated. English Historical Review contributor Rowena E. Archer took issue with Berg's assertion that Power is in danger of being forgotten, but concluded that A Woman in History "is rich in history and humanity—pick it up and you will not be able to put it down."

In her 2005 title Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Berg argues that the Industrial Revolution was driven largely by demand, specifically the emerging middle class's desire for luxury goods. "This is an ingeniously argued and well researched study," commented a Contemporary Review contributor, that "sheds much fascinating light."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Business History Review, summer, 1987, Ann Kussmaul, review of The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain, 1700-1820, p. 349; summer, 1991, R.A. Houston, review of Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe, p. 450; April, 1992, Katrina Honeyman, review of Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe, p. 113; October, 1995, D.T. Jenkins, review of The Age of Manufactures, p. 104; July, 1999, David J. Jeremy, review of Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives, p. 173; April, 2001, Lesley Miller, review of Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850, p. 125.

Contemporary Review, April, 1997, Molly Mortimer, review of A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889-1940, p. 220; December, 2005, review of Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, p. 377.

English Historical Review, September, 1998, Rowena E. Archer, review of A Woman in History, p. 1027.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, autumn, 2000, Denise Z. Davidson, review of Consumers and Luxury, p. 253.

Journal of Modern History, June, 1997, Reed Geiger, review of The Age of Manufactures, p. 341; September, 1998, Elaine Clark, review of A Woman in History, p. 688.

Journal of Social History, summer, 2001, Katherine B. Aaslestad, review of Consumers and Luxury, p. 987.