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This chapter explores the trans-national and cross-regional interactions and connections that, beginning in the late eighteenth century, brought about the development of dualistic economies within and outside of Europe; and how this circuit was reconfigured after the world wars by means of decolonization, nationalism, “first” and “second” world development, and globalization. What this perspective brings into view is a horizontal rather than vertical division of the world: the synchronic and interdependent development of dynamic focal points of growth throughout the world shaped, both within and outside of Europe, by trans-local interaction and connection, as well as by local struggles and relations of dominance and subordination.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the theory of a control revolution in nineteenth century England, and its social and technological implications for the information society. It takes up where most historical interpretations of the industrial revolution end, and before most analyses of the digital era begin. The work focuses on three distinct types of technological advance – in transportation, in communication, and in the processing of information – without adopting a technologically deterministic argument.

Historical analysis, based on both primary and secondary sources.

The article first considers the introduction of the railways, and makes a case in that there were two crises of control involving railway technology in the nineteenth century: a crisis of communication, and a crisis of organisation. It goes on to assess the growth of bureaucracy and organisation in commerce. The expansion of government surveillance power towards the end of the nineteenth century is also discussed.

This paper is broad in its scope and therefore some necessary omissions and limitations have been made. Many of the terms used throughout have entire literatures on their meanings, but it is not the intention of this paper to engage further with these debates, and it is acknowledged that within this limited discussion there is room for some ambiguity surrounding terms. Such concepts have been defined as far as possible within the article. The impact of warfare and military organisation are key themes, and while extremely relevant, deserve fuller discussion elsewhere. Also, while there would have undoubtedly been effects upon the British Empire from English industrialisation and the resulting crises of control, it has not been possible to discuss the implications of differing socio‐economic and political conditions within the Empire in this paper. The increasing sophistication of other professions such as finance and accounting in this period have not been considered, although again, this is an area which deserves individual study[1].

The research takes a step towards demonstrating that the origins of the information society can be traced back to the structural and organisational implications of the control revolution of the nineteenth century. The methods of control created the basic communication infrastructures still used in 2005, and set the precedent for government intervention and social surveillance. It concludes by discussing the potential crises of control within the information society.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

Race has played a central role in state-building in Latin America. This chapter foregrounds the role of transnational racialization politics in bureaucratic development in the region in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing the transformation of the Bolivian diplomatic bureaucracy following the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), I argue that the circulation in Europe and the Americas of racial discourses on Bolivia that cast doubt on its place among the concert of civilized nations motivated its reform and expansion. This study suggests that, given the potential costs of transnational racialization threats, states across the region developed agencies and practices that expanded their capacity to manage their racialized national images among international audiences. Against the threat of racialized imperialism and colonialism, Bolivian liberal reformers envisioned a diplomatic bureaucracy capable of negotiating Bolivia's place in the global racial imaginary abroad. This study emphasizes the central role of the diplomatic bureaucracy as a condition of possibility in these projects and directs attention to the role of race in the development of state agencies less commonly associated with race, such as diplomacy.

In the Europe of the nineteenth century, a significant increase in abandoned children was caused by demographic pressures and growing economic difficulties that progressively afflicted the lowest social strata of the population. Those who had neither family, nor school, educated themselves in the streets or learned from patron‐tutors who aspired to produce a specific social subject, channelizing their “congenitally” subversive tendencies through a certain kind of structured apprenticeship. This model of education (or “bad education”) can be defined as the formalization, paradoxically devoid of symbols and alphabet, of the experience of the street within a specific system of knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to seek to encounter in literary sources the traces of the education of these marginalized children.

The authors intend to study, by means of the testimony of novels, the mentality of this historic period and the phenomenon of this very different kind of childhood. The epistemological and methodological viewpoint that is adopted is both ethnographic and historical, since the authors are attempting to understand and establish the evolving nexuses and dynamics of the educational phenomenon that is the object of the investigation.

The central objective of this investigation lies in the notion of “bad education”. By “bad education” the authors mean the presence of an educational itinerary, an acculturation, a personality formation, and a professionalization that have all strayed from the dominant, hegemonic social models. This “model” of education forms part of the prevailing educational philosophy of a particular epoch and historical situation, as demonstrated throughout this paper.

This paper proposes an operation of educational archaeology. However, this operation can contribute to an epistemological awareness that can greatly benefit both the pedagogical reflections of our time and the educations of so many marginalized children who inhabit the destitute streets of the contemporary metropolis.

This chapter contributes to a better knowledge of the role played by the collective entrepreneurship of networks of scientists and doctors in the transfer and adaptation of ideas on hospital organization and management for modern hospitals with new technology, from Western Europe and above all the United States. Literature about new medical technology has demonstrated how medical innovations required changes in human capital and organization in hospitals, to benefit patients in the private and the public hospitals after World War II. The chapter provides an analysis about the origins of the modern North American ideas about professionalization and hospital accreditation, in the consolidation of a modern hospital management and organization. In particular, the focus is in demonstrating how networks of scientists’ entrepreneurs were fundamental drivers in the process of knowledge transfer and the dissemination of these ideas to the large Western European hospitals. More specifically, the chapter studies the diffusion of the new ideas about the large hospital organization and management from the United States to the Western Europe, applied to the Spanish context. Informal networks of doctors applied new ideas developed in the United States to new clinics and hospitals in Spain. Some of them occupied official positions in the key public health administrations and were crucial to introducing the hospital accreditation systems and the US ideas in Spain.

From the mid‐nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire. This article provides an analytical framework to understand the engagement between changing ideas of higher education at the centre of Empire and within the settler societies in the Antipodes. Imperial influences remained significant, but so was locality in association with the role of the emerging state, while the idea of the public purpose of higher education helped to widen social access forming and sustaining the basis of middle class professions.

The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fur trade in the United States and Canada that sent hundreds of thousands of furs to Europe and China relied on “Cheap Labor” and the abundance of “Cheap Raw Materials,” that is to say, living beings such as sea otter, land otter, beaver, and seals. Native American labor, procured by and paid through trade goods in a kind of “putting out” piece-rate system, was cheap partially because their lives were maintained/reproduced through traditional agricultural or hunting and gathering economies. The commodification of fur-bearing animals led to their sharp decline and in some cases near extinction. Cheap labor and cheap living beings interacted dynamically in unison to enable capital accumulation under mercantile capitalism. At the very end of the nineteenth century, fur farming as a petty capitalist enterprise became common in Canada and the United States, and more recently has expanded greatly in China.