Reviews for The Internet Depression: The Boom, the Bust and Beyond

The average rating for The Internet Depression: The Boom, the Bust and Beyond based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-12-05 00:00:00 Amanda Alverez The authors see the British Empire as lacking a strong political direction, and instead being a series of strong, global, networks. These networks operated economically in the way British consumers were linked together by cultural consumption- by specifically buying imperial goods, reading imperial advertisements, etc. Migration between Britain and other parts of the world was key in constructing these networks, as "it was, above all, personal connections and social networks that embedded economic activity within cultural contexts" (15). Together, migration of goods, people and capital thus created the British Empire in the minds of subjects even when direct political imperatives were lacking. The British bloc which emerged became an advocated of an integrated, globalizing world, until the First World War led to a xenophobic turn. My main criticism is that British protectionism before 1914 was not addressed. As I am mostly interested in the relationship between labor and globalization, I would have liked to have seen more analysis of the ways in which workers called upon the Empire to aid them and the conflicts which emerged with proponents of a global economy.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-08 00:00:00 Autumn Veilleux I think this book represents the new big thing in imperial history. Some historians have compared the authors to the other two pairs of historians to have significantly influenced imperial history - Robinson and Gallagher, and Cain and Hopkins - but Empire and Globalisation is probably more modest in its achievement. In the first place, it's relatively short at 244 pages, and it reads almost like an extended essay. More importantly, it draws chiefly upon two scholarly trends that are already well developed in their own right. The first is the prominence given by Cain and Hopkins to the role of finance and commerce in driving imperial expansion. Thompson and Magee contribute to this scholarship by showing that British overseas investment tended to prefer destinations with familiar cultures, customs, laws, and political traditions - Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and even in the United States. The British preference for other parts of the "white empire" arose partly because investors held many connections there - family, business, and personal -, and partly because investors could be confident that those colonies, because they were predominantly "British" in habit and outlook, could be trusted to do business in ways acceptable and familiar to investors in London. The second contribution, which complements the first, is that Empire and Globalisation draws upon the recent body of work now known as the "British World," a scholarly project that sees the predominantly white, English-speaking countries (including the United States) as a transnational culture group, politically divided yet broadly united by shared bonds of race, language, culture, economy, and political tradition. Thompson and Magee show how transnational networks of people, goods, ideas, and capital integrated the British World and thereby shaped the phase of globalization that occurred between 1850 and 1914. Thompson and Magee thus bring together these two subfields of imperial history in unique and innovative ways, and by so doing their short book charts the way for much research that will undoubtedly follow in its wake.