Made In Europe

This edited collection studies the production and dissemination of popular music, tourism, cinema, fashion, broadcasting programmes, advertising and coffee in Western Europe in the twentieth century. Focussing on the supply side of popular culture, it addresses a field of study that is neglected in European historiography. Moreover, it provides a theoretical and methodological discussion that takes into account the inherent dynamics of content production and the role of cultural intermediaries in the change of cultural repertoires. Taking key developments in the culture industries in the USA as a point of reference, the book highlights particularities of cultural production in Europe. It identifies a greater autonomy of creatives, stronger influence of critics and a lesser concern with audience research as three characteristics of the production regime in Western Europe. It takes into view the transfer of popular culture across the Atlantic and between European countries and offers new insights into research on the cultural Americanisation of Europe. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

Edited by Vladmir Arkhipov. Foreword by Susan B. Glasser.

A Europe Made of Money is a new history of the making of the European Monetary System (EMS), based on extensive archive research. Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol highlights two long-term processes in the monetary and economic negotiations in the decade leading up to the founding of the EMS in 1979. The first is a transnational learning process involving a powerful, networked European monetary elite that shaped a habit of cooperation among technocrats. The second stresses the importance of the European Council, which held regular meetings between heads of government beginning in 1974, giving EEC legitimacy to monetary initiatives that had previously involved semisecret and bilateral negotiations. The interaction of these two features changed the EMS from a fairly trivial piece of administrative business to a tremendously important political agreement. The inception of the EMS was greeted as one of the landmark achievements of regional cooperation, a major leap forward in the creation of a unified Europe. Yet Mourlon-Druol’s account stresses that the EMS is much more than a success story of financial cooperation. The technical suggestions made by its architects reveal how state elites conceptualized the larger project of integration. And their monetary policy became a marker for the conception of European identity. The unveiling of the EMS, Mourlon-Druol concludes, represented the convergence of material interests and symbolic, identity-based concerns.

In this second volume of home-made artifacts, Russian artist Vladimir Arkhipov has travelled across Europe to further his collection. The objects he has found are made by everyday people inspired to create something themselves, rather than buying manufactured goods. His archive includes hundreds of objects created with idiosyncratic functional qualities: an Austrian ski-bob made using an old bicycle frame, and a device from Germany that enables a musician to play three brass tubas at once. Featuring 230 individual artifacts from Albania, Austria, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and Wales, accompanied by a photograph of the creator, their story of how the object came about, its function and the materials used to create it. The book is an essential companion to the first volume by the same author, expanding its theme. Here the objects are more recent, suggesting that the home-made phenomenon transcends simple necessity. Many have been made in pursuit of a hobby, or because the maker had the time and inclination to construct something personal. But with others (in Albania for example) the objects feel like they might be more vital to the maker's livelihood.

One thousand years ago, a traveler to Baghdad or the Chinese capital Kaifeng would have discovered a vast and flourishing city of broad streets, spacious gardens, and sophisticated urban amenities; meanwhile, Paris, Rome, and London were cramped and unhygienic collections of villages, and Europe was a backwater. How, then, did it rise to world preeminence over the next several centuries? This is the central historical conundrum of modern times. How Europe Made the Modern World draws upon the latest scholarship dealing with the various aspects of the West's divergence, including geography, demography, technology, culture, institutions, science and economics. It avoids the twin dangers of Eurocentrism and anti-Westernism, strongly emphasizing the contributions of other cultures of the world to the West's rise while rejecting the claim that there was nothing distinctive about Europe in the premodern period. Daly provides a concise summary of the debate from both sides, whilst also presenting his own provocative arguments. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, and including maps and images to illuminate key evidence, this book will inspire students to think critically and engage in debates rather than accepting a single narrative of the rise of the West. It is an ideal primer for students studying Western Civilization and World History courses.

When everything is destined to be designed, design disappears into the everyday. We simply do not see it anymore because it is everywhere. This is the vanishing act of design. At this moment, design registers its redundancy: our products, environments and services have been comprehensively improved. Everything has been designed to perfection and is under a permanent upgrade regime.Within such a paradigm, design is taken over by the capitalist logic of reproduction. But this does not come without conflicts, struggles and tensions. The most obvious of these, is that design is constantly being replaced. Our dispense culture prompts a yearning for longevity. The compulsion to delete brings alive a desire to retrieve objects, ideas and experiences that refuse to become obsolete. Society is growing more aware of sustainability and alert to the depletion of this world. For the ambitious designer, it is time to take the next step: designing the future with a more holistic consideration and approach. The book is a critical look at the design world with its various design disciplines and how these have developed in the past 10 years. Made in China, Designed in California, Criticised in Europeis for professional designers that care about design, the environment and how we live.

This is a selective and innovative biography of Luigi Einaudi, the most outstanding scientific and political Italian personality of the first sixty decades of the 20th century. This biography highlights some lesser-known and largely unrecognized, original contributions to theories and policies that were developed and applied even many years after his death. His European writings span more than sixty-two years (1987-1959), and his proposals for a European federation have inspired 30% of the articles of the Treaty on the functioning of the EU. As a thinker, he inspired Jean Monnet, and as President of Italy, he influenced, discretely but substantially, the Italian government’s stance on the European Coal and Steel Community Treaty. Today’s “forward guidance” of the European Central Bank (ECB) is quite similar to the way he enforced his monetary policy action in 1947, after becoming governor of the Bank of Italy in 1945. Even the “unconventional” monetary policy of the ECB has clear Einaudian bases. He posited the bases of the so-called “social market economy”, as well as the ‘time inconsistency’ theory and the section of migration theory that placed emphasis on pull factors.

How well are European firms responding to the new opportunities for growth, and in which global value chains are they developing these new activities? The policy discussion on the future of manufacturing requires an understanding of the changing role of manufacturing in Europe's growth agenda.