The French geologist Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741-1819) abandoned the legal profession to pursue studies in natural history, working at the museum of natural history in Paris and as royal commissioner of mines. His enthusiasm for geology took him in 1784 to Britain, to investigate the basalt formations on the Hebridean island of Staffa described by Sir Joseph Banks in Pennant's Tour in Scotland (also reissued in this series). His subsequent account was published in France in 1797, and first translated into English in an abridged form in 1814. This two-volume annotated translation by the well-known geologist Sir Archibald Geikie (1835-1924), prefaced by a short biography of Faujas, was published in 1907. The work is interesting for its social as well as its geological observations. Volume 1 describes life in scientific circles in London, before recounting Faujas' journey to the Highlands of Scotland via Edinburgh and Glasgow.

In 1836 the United States government received a strange and unprecedented gift - a bequest of 104,960 gold sovereigns (then worth half a million dollars) to establish a foundation in Washington 'for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men'. The Smithsonian Institution, as it would eventually be called, grew into the largest museum and research complex in the world. Yet it owes its existence to an Englishman who never set foot in the United States, and who has remained a shadowy figure for more than a hundred and fifty years. Smithson lived a restless life in the capitals of Europe during the turbulent years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; at one time he was trailed by the French secret police, and later languished as a prisoner of war in Denmark for four long years. Yet despite a certain a penchant for gambling and fine living, he had, by the time of his death in Paris in 1829, amassed a financial fortune and a wealth of scientific papers that he left to the new democracy America. Spurned by his natural father and his country, he would be acknowledged for his own achievements in the New World. Drawing on unpublished diaries and letters from archives all over Europe and the United States, Heather Ewing tells the full and compelling story for the first time, revealing a life lived at the heart of the English Enlightenment and illuminating the mind that sparked the creation of America's greatest museum.

First Published in 1987. Representing a range of eighteenth-century research, these articles clarify or reorientate the historical origins of many of the chief themes of more recent business history. They include the areas of The Harburgh Company from 1716 to 1723; institutional experimentation in the London-Maryland Trade; banking in London in the 1700s; the pottery trade before 1780; the Birmingham Economy; Boulton and Wedgwood; financing the French navy; and directions of conduct in a merchant’s counting house.

This fascinating collection presents industrialization as a total historical process involving the destruction of one world simultaneously with the creation of another. Divided into two sections, it deals with elements of life such as the organization of labour, the health of the nation, rural and industrial societies, and poverty. The first section (The Expanding Economy) outlines the process by which economic growth took place and the second (The Social Impact) shows the impact this growth had on the society which both promoted and resisted it.