Frontline and Factory


Book Description

This book represents a first considered attempt to study the factors that conditioned industrial chemistry for war in 1914-18. Taking a comparative perspective, it reflects on the experience of France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Britain, Italy and Russia, and points to significant similarities and differences. It looks at changing patterns in the organisation of industry, and at the emerging symbiosis between science, industry and the military.










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Contemporary Asian Artistic Expressions and Tourism


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This book explores the relationship between tourism/tourists and expressions of contemporary Asian art (for example, artists, objects, intangible artistic productions, digital manifestations, etc) in Asian and non-Asian tourist spaces/experiences. Although the nexus between art and tourism has not been neglected in the literature, work on contemporary art and tourism is lacking, and this is particularly true within the context of non-Western societies. This volume creates a timely counterpoint to the existing dominance of a Western-centric body of knowledge in the area. The book considers how encounters between tourists and expressions of Asian contemporary art may produce possibilities for challenging, re-evaluating or reasserting crystallized frames of understanding and, as such, is of value to a multi-disciplinary audience.







Gunpowder, Explosives and the State


Book Description

Gunpowder studies are still in their infancy despite the long-standing civil and military importance of this explosive since its discovery in China in the mid-ninth century AD. In this second volume by contributors who meet regularly at symposia of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), the research is again rooted in the investigation of the technology of explosives manufacture, but the fact that the chapters range in scope from the Old World to the New, from sources of raw materials in south-east Asia to the complications of manufacture in the West, shows that the story is more than the simple one of how an intriguing product was made. This volume is the first to develop the implications of the subject, not just in the sense of relating it to changing military technologies, but in that of seeing the securing of gunpowder supplies as fundamental to the power of the state and imperial pretensions.The search for saltpetre, for example, an essential ingredient of gunpowder, became a powerful engine of sea-going European trade from the early seventeenth century. Smaller states like Venice were unable to form these distant connections, and so to sustain a gunpowder army. Stronger states like France and Britain were able to do so, and became even more powerful as the demand for improved explosives fostered national strengths - leading to a development of the sciences, especially chemistry, in the former case, and of manufacturing techniques in the latter.




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