In From Old Regime to Industrial State, Richard H. Tilly and Michael Kopsidis question established thinking about Germany’s industrialization. While some hold that Germany experienced a sudden breakthrough to industrialization, the authors instead consider a long view, incorporating market demand, agricultural advances, and regional variations in industrial innovativeness, customs, and governance.  They begin their assessment earlier than previous studies to show how the 18th-century emergence of international trade and the accumulation of capital by merchants fed commercial expansion and innovation. This book provides the history behind the modern German economic juggernaut.

Depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle, il y a toujours eu des commerçants pour expérimenter de nouvelles manières de répondre à la demande des consommateurs. C’est cette histoire que ce livre retrace pour la France, du magasin de nouveautés jusqu’au e-commerce en passant par le grand magasin et l’hypermarché. L’analyse s’intéresse autant aux innovations de détail qu’aux révolutions commerciales en démêlant les interactions entre les transformations du commerce et les évolutions de la consommation. Cette approche met en perspective la crise actuelle de la distribution qui se concentre dans les difficultés de l’hypermarché et s’interroge sur la capacité des distributeurs à le réinventer.

This collective volume aims at studying a variety of labour history themes in Southern Europe, and investigating the　transformations of labour and labour relations that these areas underwent in the 19th and the 20th centuries. The　subjects studied include industrial labour relations in Southern Europe; labour on the sea and in the shipyards of the Mediterranean; small enterprises and small land ownership in relation to labour; formal and informal labour; the tendency　towards independent work and the role of culture; forms of labour management (from paternalistic policies to the provision of welfare capitalism); the importance of the institutional framework and the wider political context; and women’s labour and gender relations.