Books by Barbara Hahn
Technological change is about more than inventions. This concise history of the Industrial Revolu... more Technological change is about more than inventions. This concise history of the Industrial Revolution places the eighteenth-century British Industrial Revolution in global context, locating its causes in government protection, global competition, and colonialism. Inventions from spinning jennies to steam engines came to define an age that culminated in the acceleration of the fashion cycle, the intensification in demand and supply of raw materials and the rise of a plantation system that would reconfigure world history in favour of British (and European) global domination. In this accessible analysis of the classic case of rapid and revolutionary technological change, Barbara Hahn takes readers from the north of England to slavery, cotton plantations, the Anglo-Indian trade and beyond - placing technological change at the centre of world history.
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""In her sweeping history of the American tobacco industry, Barbara Hahn traces the emergence of ... more ""In her sweeping history of the American tobacco industry, Barbara Hahn traces the emergence of the tobacco plant's many varietal types, arguing that they are products not of nature but of economic relations and continued and intense market regulation.
Hahn focuses her study on the most popular of these varieties, Bright Flue-Cured Tobacco. First grown in the inland Piedmont along the Virginia–North Carolina border, Bright Tobacco now grows all over the world, primarily because of its unique—and easily replicated—cultivation and curing methods. Hahn traces the evolution of technologies in a variety of regulatory and cultural environments to reconstruct how Bright Tobacco became, and remains to this day, a leading commodity in the global tobacco industry.
This study asks not what effect tobacco had on the world market, but how that market shaped tobacco into types that served specific purposes and became distinguishable from one another more by technologies of production than genetics. In so doing, it explores the intersection of crossbreeding, tobacco-raising technology, changing popular demand, attempts at regulation, and sheer marketing ingenuity during the heyday of the American tobacco industry.
Combining economic theory with the history of technology, Making Tobacco Bright revises several narratives in American history, from colonial staple-crop agriculture to the origins of the tobacco industry to the rise of identity politics in the twentieth century.
Barbara Hahn is an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University.""
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Papers by Barbara Hahn
Civil War Book Review, 2012
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Technology and culture
The essays in this forum brace this meditation on the historiography of technology. Understanding... more The essays in this forum brace this meditation on the historiography of technology. Understanding devices incorporates the context of any particular hardware, as John Staudenmaier showed by quantifying the contents of the first decades of Technology and Culture. As contextualist approaches have widened from systems theory through social construction and into the assemblages of actor-network theory, the discipline has kept artifacts at the analytical center: it is the history of technology that scholars seek to understand. Even recognizing that the machine only embodies the technology, the discipline has long sought to explain the machine. These essays invite consideration of how the history of technology might apply to non-corporeal things-methods as well as machines, and all the worldly phenomena that function in technological ways even without physicality. Materiality is financial as well as corporeal, the history of capitalism reminds us, and this essay urges scholars to apply hi...
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Hahn, B. (Summer 2015). Review Essay of Beckert, _Empire of Cotton_ and Baptist, _The Half Has Ne... more Hahn, B. (Summer 2015). Review Essay of Beckert, _Empire of Cotton_ and Baptist, _The Half Has Never Been Told_. Agricultural History.
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State of the Field: The History of Technology
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This paper uses the mechanisation of spinning as a case study to explain the approaches and metho... more This paper uses the mechanisation of spinning as a case study to explain the approaches and methods employed by historians of technology, who have for too long left the Industrial Revolution to scholars in other sub-disciplines. As a result of this neglect, scholarship on the topic has seen the innovations in textile production of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the product of exceptional individuals or, more vaguely, as necessity causing invention. Instead, historians of technology study the complex causal relationship between social and technological change, including economic and trade incentives as well as contingency in the adoption of new methods and machines. This paper explains current approaches in the history of technology, including internalist and externalist analysis, technological determinism and social construction, systems theory and actor-network theory, and explains them in the concrete terms of the case.
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Agricultural History 88:3, Jun 2014
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History News Network (HNN), Nov 4, 2013
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Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, Sep 30, 2013
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Civil War Book Review, Jul 2012
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This article compares two episodes of technology transfer in the 1890s: the movement of bright to... more This article compares two episodes of technology transfer in the 1890s: the movement of bright tobacco production technology to south-central Africa with the spread of the crop to eastern North Carolina and South Carolina. It finds similarities in the people who introduced the crop, but significant differences in the methods used to produce it. This is troubling because the type is defined by the cultivation and especially the curing techniques used to produce it; it is also often described in the historical literature as “Virginia tobacco,” even when grown elsewhere. The technological differences are the product of different environments, which include not only the climate but also many elements of the technological system beyond immediate human control: the availability and organization of labor, differences in market structures and marketing institutions, and the government incentives provided to buyers. Therefore, this essay takes as its subject the paradox inherent in the official classification of tobacco types regulated by the USDA and argues that varietal types represent a form of market regulation disguised as botanical taxonomy.
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Dissertation Summary, published in conjunction with the Herman E. Krooss Dissertation Plenary, An... more Dissertation Summary, published in conjunction with the Herman E. Krooss Dissertation Plenary, Annual Meeting of the Business History Conference, Cleveland, Oh., May 31-June 2, 2007.
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Early city plans situated railroads to clear slums, linking the long-standing infrastructure inte... more Early city plans situated railroads to clear slums, linking the long-standing infrastructure interests of businessmen to the agendas of Progressive reformers. In Cincinnati, nineteenth-century business leaders advocated railroad construction and reorganization to institute reasonable freight rates. In the twentieth century, they achieved their desires by establishing a mandate in municipal government for the new profession of urban planning, with its political power to shape the physical city and the use of private property within it.
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Museum Exhibits by Barbara Hahn
"The Industrial Revolution in Leeds" was part of a day-long workshop entitled "War of the Fibres.... more "The Industrial Revolution in Leeds" was part of a day-long workshop entitled "War of the Fibres." Associated with both the Rethinking Textiles and the Enterprise of Culture projects at the School of History, University of Leeds, funded by the European Commission, this exhibit collaborated with Special Collections at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, to illuminate the textile history of Leeds and Yorkshire. Understudied fibers of the Industrial Revolution included wool, worsteds, and linen, flax and silk, all of which were represented in the exhibit and the workshop.
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Teaching Documents by Barbara Hahn
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Books by Barbara Hahn
Hahn focuses her study on the most popular of these varieties, Bright Flue-Cured Tobacco. First grown in the inland Piedmont along the Virginia–North Carolina border, Bright Tobacco now grows all over the world, primarily because of its unique—and easily replicated—cultivation and curing methods. Hahn traces the evolution of technologies in a variety of regulatory and cultural environments to reconstruct how Bright Tobacco became, and remains to this day, a leading commodity in the global tobacco industry.
This study asks not what effect tobacco had on the world market, but how that market shaped tobacco into types that served specific purposes and became distinguishable from one another more by technologies of production than genetics. In so doing, it explores the intersection of crossbreeding, tobacco-raising technology, changing popular demand, attempts at regulation, and sheer marketing ingenuity during the heyday of the American tobacco industry.
Combining economic theory with the history of technology, Making Tobacco Bright revises several narratives in American history, from colonial staple-crop agriculture to the origins of the tobacco industry to the rise of identity politics in the twentieth century.
Barbara Hahn is an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University.""
Papers by Barbara Hahn
Museum Exhibits by Barbara Hahn
Teaching Documents by Barbara Hahn
Hahn focuses her study on the most popular of these varieties, Bright Flue-Cured Tobacco. First grown in the inland Piedmont along the Virginia–North Carolina border, Bright Tobacco now grows all over the world, primarily because of its unique—and easily replicated—cultivation and curing methods. Hahn traces the evolution of technologies in a variety of regulatory and cultural environments to reconstruct how Bright Tobacco became, and remains to this day, a leading commodity in the global tobacco industry.
This study asks not what effect tobacco had on the world market, but how that market shaped tobacco into types that served specific purposes and became distinguishable from one another more by technologies of production than genetics. In so doing, it explores the intersection of crossbreeding, tobacco-raising technology, changing popular demand, attempts at regulation, and sheer marketing ingenuity during the heyday of the American tobacco industry.
Combining economic theory with the history of technology, Making Tobacco Bright revises several narratives in American history, from colonial staple-crop agriculture to the origins of the tobacco industry to the rise of identity politics in the twentieth century.
Barbara Hahn is an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University.""
The Cotton Kings relates a rip-roaring drama of competition in the marketplace and reveals the damage markets can cause when they do not work properly. It also explains how they can be fixed through careful regulation. At the turn of the twentieth century, cotton was still the major agricultural product of the American South and an important commodity for world industry. Key to marketing cotton were futures contracts, traded at exchanges in New York and New Orleans. Futures contracts had the potential to hedge risk and reduce price volatility, but only if the markets in which they were traded worked properly. Increasing corruption on the powerful New York Cotton Exchange pushed prices steadily downwards in the 1890s, impoverishing millions of cotton farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to solve the problem with better crop predictions and market information, shared equally and simultaneously with all participants, but these efforts failed.
To fight the cotton market's corruption, cotton brokers in New Orleans, led by William P. Brown and Frank Hayne, began quietly to assemble resources. They triumphed in the summer of 1903, when they cornered the world market in cotton and raised its price to reflect the reality of increasing demand and struggling supply. The brokers' success pushed up the price of cotton for the next ten years. However, the structural problems of self-regulation by market participants still threatened the cotton trade. More corruption at the New York Cotton Exchange appeared, until eventually political pressure inspired the Cotton Futures Act of 1914, the federal government's first successful regulation of a financial derivative.
http://tinyurl.com/BuyCottonKings