Industrial History, Working Lives, Nation, and Empire, Viewed through Some Key Welsh Woollen Objects

This chapter takes a very specific example—the woollen industry in Wales, at various points between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries—and uses it to demonstrate how a history of objects and the specific materiality of industrial products can unlock important conjunctions of politics, imperialism, nationalism, economics and trade, consumption, and social history. The chapter demonstrates that both conventional economic and social history and new debates about materiality are essential for understanding the histories of labour and production as well as the relationship between imperial or global economies and real lives in specific localities—issues that matter now more than ever, in a global capitalism that draws upon production in a range of fragile localities.