Sheffield's story is one of fierce independence and a revolutionary spirit, its industrial origins having their roots in the same forests as the legends of Robin Hood. From Huntsman's crucible steel in the eighteenth century, to Brearley's stainless steel in the twentieth, Sheffield forged the very fabric of the modern world. As the industrial age drew to a close the city's reputation for rebelliousness spawned its popular reputation as capital of the 'People's Republic of South Yorkshire'. Yet in the wake of the Miners' Strike and the Hillsborough Disaster, the early twenty-first century has seen Sheffield retain its unique character while reinventing itself as a centre of education, creativity and innovation.

In this book, Maxine Berg explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the eighteenth century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities,and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new wants. This unparalleled 'product revolution' provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a 'new luxury', one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain is cultural history at its best, built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. Maxine Berg traces how this new consumer society of the eighteenth century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialization itself. Global markets for the consumer goods of private and domestic life inspired the industrial revolution and British products 'won the world'.

Originally published in 1959, this book examines the shifting role of attorneys and solicitors in the eighteenth century, a period that saw the growth and development of the professional classes and their affiliated organizations. Robson describes the changing social character of lawyers, the methods by which they were trained and the part they played in affairs of banking, politics and other public spheres. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in British social or legal history.

Horgan analyses the importance of songs in British eighteenth-century culture with specific reference to their political meaning. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, combining the perspectives of literary studies and cultural history, the utilitarian power of songs emerges across four major case studies.

Covering thousands of years and a multitude of topics, the book tells the story of the development from a group of small agricultural settlements into a town and then a modern city. It covers success, disappointments, miserable periods and glorious episodes that have marked the city's evolution.