First Published in 1966. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Engines of Mischief explores the day-to-day labor, economic, political, and social climate at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Manchester, England, between 1817 and 1818. Using new economic theories of the time, parliamentary commissions, and news reports, students will engage with crucial issues of the day, debating factory conditions and child labor; the role of the government in the economy, taxation, workers' unions; and the extension of political rights down the social hierarchy. In the game, by assuming the roles of historical actors from various classes of society, students are faced with choices about how to live and prosper during this period of great technological, economic, and social transformation. Will the working class violently resist new technology in factories, form unions, or join radical political clubs to improve their working conditions and protect their rights? How best will middle-class entrepreneurs run their enterprises; will they provide fair treatment to their workers or simply maximize their profit? How will the aristocrats maintain their power in government and society? Will they support the middle or the working classes?

In Black Bodies, White Gold Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes the histories of the Black diaspora central to nineteenth-century cultural production. She traces the emergence of a speculative vision that informs perceptions of Blackness in which artistic renderings of cotton—as both commodity and material—became inexorably tied to the monetary value of Black bodies. From the production and representation of “negro cloth”—the textile worn by enslaved plantation workers—to depictions of Black sharecroppers in photographs and paintings, Arabindan-Kesson demonstrates that visuality was the mechanism through which Blackness and cotton became equated as resources for extraction. In addition to interrogating the work of nineteenth-century artists, she engages with contemporary artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, Lubaina Himid, and Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, who contend with the commercial and imperial processes shaping constructions of Blackness and meanings of labor.