Who has decided how Europeans have dressed and dwelled? Traveled and dined? Worked and played? Who, in fact, can be credited with the shaping of Europe? Certainly inventors, engineers, and politicians played their parts. But in the making of Europe, consumers, tinkerers, and rebels were an unrecognized force - until now. In this book, historians Ruth Oldenziel and Mikael Hård spotlight the people who 'made' Europe - by appropriating technology, protesting for and against it. Using examples from Britain and the Continent, the authors illustrate the conflicts that accompanied the modern technologies, from the sewing machine to the bicycle, the Barbie doll to personal computers. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of how Europeans have lived, from the 1850s to the current century.

How ecological design emerged in Scandinavia during the 1960s and 1970s, building on both Scandinavia’s design culture and its environmental movement. Scandinavia is famous for its design culture, and for its pioneering efforts toward a sustainable future. In Ecological by Design, Kjetil Fallan shows how these two forces came together in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Scandinavian designers began to question the endless cycle in which designed objects are produced, consumed, discarded, and replaced in quick succession. The emergence of ecological design in Scandinavia at the height of the popular environmental movement, Fallan suggests, illuminates a little-known reciprocity between environmentalism and design: not only did design play a role in the rise of modern environmentalism, but ecological thinking influenced the transformation in design culture in Scandinavia and beyond that began as the modernist faith in progress and prosperity waned. Fallan describes the efforts of Scandinavian designers to forge an environmental ethics in a commercial design culture sustained by consumption; shows, by recounting a quest for sustainability through Norwegian wood(s), that one of the main characteristics of ecological design is attention to both the local and the global; and explores the emergence of a respectful and sustainable paradigm for international development. Case studies trace key connections to continental Europe, Britain, the US, Central America, and East Africa. Today, ideas of sustainability permeate design discourse, but the historical emergence of ecological design remains largely undiscussed. With this trailblazing book, Fallan fills that gap.

Capitalism has been a controversial concept. In the second half of the 20th century, many historians have either not used the concept at all, or only in passing. Many regarded the term as too broad, holistic and vague or too value-loaded, ideological and polemic. This volume brings together leading scholars to explore why the term has recently experienced a comeback and assess how useful the term can be in application to social and economic history. The contributors discuss whether and how the history of capitalism enables us to ask new questions, further explore unexhausted sources and discover new connections between previously unrelated phenomena. The chapters address case studies drawn from around the world, giving attention to Europe, Africa and beyond. This is a timely reassessment of a crucial concept, which will be of great interest to scholars and students of economic history.

In this open access book, Mikael Hård tells a story of how people around the world challenged the production techniques and products brought by globalization. Retaining their autonomy and freedom, creative individuals selectively adopted or rejected modern gadgets, tools, and machines. In standard historical narratives, globalization is portrayed as an unstoppable force that flattens all obstacles in its path. Modern technology is also seen as inexorable: in the nineteenth century, steamships, telegraph lines, and Gatling guns are said to have paved the way for colonialism and other forms of dominating people and societies. Later, shipping containers and computer networks purportedly pulled the planet deeper into a maelstrom of capitalism. Hård discusses instances that push back against these narratives. For example, in Soviet times, inhabitants of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, preferred to remain in—and expand—their own mud-brick houses rather than move into prefabricated, concrete residential buildings. Similarly, nineteenth-century Sumatran carpenters ignored the saws brought to them by missionaries—and chose to chop down trees with their arch-bladed adzes. And people in colonial India successfully competed with capitalist-run Caribbean sugar plantations, continuing to produce their own muscovado and sell it to local consumers. This book invites readers to view the history of technology and material culture through the lens of diversity. Based on research funded by the European Research Council and conducted in the Global South, Microhistories of Technology: Making the World shows that the spread of modern technologies did not erase artisanal production methods and traditional tools.

The question of consumption emerged as a major focus of research and scholarship in the 1990s but the breadth and diversity of consumer culture has not been fully enough explored. The meanings of consumption, particularly in relation to lifestyle and identity, are of great importance to academic areas including business studies, sociology, cultural and media studies, psychology, geography and politics. The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture is a one-stop resource for scholars and students of consumption, where the key dimensions of consumer culture are critically discussed and articulated. The editors have organised contributions from a global and interdisciplinary team of scholars into six key sections: Part 1: Sociology of Consumption Part 2: Geographies of Consumer Culture Part 3: Consumer Culture Studies in Marketing Part 4: Consumer Culture in Media and Cultural Studies Part 5: Material Cultures of Consumption Part 6: The Politics of Consumer Culture

Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse is an intellectual history of design and its role in configuring the modern Norwegian nation state. Rather than a conventional national design history survey that focuses on designers and objects, this is an in-depth study of the ideologies, organizations, strategies and politics that combined might be said to have "designed" the modern nation's material and visual culture. The book analyses main tropes and threads in the design discourse generated around key institutions such as museums, organisations and magazines. Beginning with how British and continental design reform ideas were mediated in Norway and merged with a nationalist sentiment in the late nineteenth century, Designing Modern Norway traces the tireless and wide-ranging work undertaken by enthusiastic and highly committed design professionals throughout the twentieth century to simultaneously modernise the nation by design and to nationalise modern design. Bringing the discussion up towards the present, the book concludes with an examination of how Norway's new-found wealth has profoundly changed the production, mediation and consumption of design.

With 29 percent of all trips made by bicycle, Copenhagen is considered a model of green transport. This book considers the underlying political conditions that enabled cycling to appeal to such a wide range of citizens in Copenhagen and asks how this can be replicated elsewhere. Despite Copenhagen’s global reputation, its success has been a result of a long political struggle and is far from completely secure. Car use in Denmark is increasing, including in Copenhagen's suburbs, and new developments in Copenhagen include more parking for cars. There is a political tension in Copenhagen over the spaces for cycling, the car, and public transit. In considering examples of backlashes and conflicts over street space in Copenhagen, this book argues that the kinds of debates happening in Copenhagen are very similar to the debates regularly occurring in cities throughout the world. This makes Copenhagen more, not less, comparable to many cities around the world, including cities in the United States. This book will appeal to upper-level undergraduates and graduates in urban geography, city planning, transportation, environmental studies, as well as transportation advocates, urban policy-makers, and anyone concerned about climate change and looking to identify paths forward in their own cities and localities.