Into the Hidden Place: Rethinking Industrialism, Industrial Revolutions, Fordism and other Cliches
Wednesday 4 November, 5pm
Schwarzman Building, Seminar Room 20.402 (History Faculty)
Speaker: David Edgerton, Kings College London
All Welcome
At the core of most histories of Europe since the nineteenth century will be found particular arguments about its changing productive base encapsulated in keywords, theoretical tics almost, like Industrialism, Industrial Revolutions (and especially the Second Industrial Revolution) and Fordism and Taylorism, indeed sometimes Taylorism-Fordism. Accounts of the development of Capitalism also depend on such concepts. In this paper I will question their validity and historiographical usefulness and make the case for a fresh history of production.
Biography:
David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History at King's College London. David graduated from St John’s College Oxford and Imperial College London. After teaching at the University of Manchester he became the founding director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London (1993-2003) where he was also Hans Rausing Professor. He joined the History department with the Centre on its transfer to King’s in August 2013. He was a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellow, 2006-2009, and gave the 2009 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Prize Lecture at the Royal Society. He is a member of the Council of the Architectural Association and a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of St. John’s College Oxford.
