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The article comments on the novel "Tono-Bungay" by H. G. Wells and the romance of modern commerce. Topics include "Tono-Bungay" published in 1909 at a time that witnessed the rapid growth of urbanization, imperial expansion, and industrialization, and with dwindling resources at home, the expropriation of raw materials from abroad spurred the impetus to capitalist accumulation, along with the creation of a market for goods manufactured from raw materials.

Chartism has generated one of the liveliest historiographies of the twentieth century, with the development of new linguistic and cultural approaches in the 1980s proving to be a particularly innovative line of enquiry. Yet the shift towards language and meaning has not been without a price. In particular, the tendency to frame Chartism as an intellectual force has led scholars to overlook the fact that Chartism was also a social movement, constituted, quite literally, of millions of working men and women, who had traditionally been excluded from the political sphere.This article uses working-class autobiography to restore a social-history dimension to our understanding of Chartism. It asks how a body of men with no experience of bourgeois forms of civic engagement orchestrated such a large-scale and sophisticated political campaign. How had a working-class ‘public’, with the capacity for effective political action, been created? And how, if at all, was the emergence of the world’s first workers’ movement related to the broader socio-economic context—in particular, to the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation with all the social flux they entailed? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the American literary regionalism, especially in the Midwest region. Writers that put emphasis on realist technique, conditions in American small town and farms during the time of industrialization and urbanization are called regionalists. Among the Midwestern regionalists are Caroline Kirkland, Edward Eggleton, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters. It notes that the place of these regionalists' work are known as the canon of American Regionalism. Several scholars like Stephanie Foote, Tom Lutz and Marjorie Pryce have documented the work of these regionalists.

The article discusses an essay by Adna Ferrin Weber on urbanization in the U.S. Weber has compiled and analyzed statistics on urban concentration. He believes that urbanization is a global phenomenon. Webber's European statistics revealed that urbanization did not begin with the nineteenth century. Also, Webber has pointed at industrialization as the principal source of rapid urbanization. It is believed that new forms of industrial production could lead to the development of urban life. Also, there is a lingering notion suggesting that the 19th century urban revolution and the ensuing industrial revolution in the U.S. is international in nature, since a revolution of a similar kind also existed elsewhere and since U.S. industries and cities were linked with other economies.

The article focuses on late-Victorian revolution in government that was emphatically a revolution carried out through local means, and chiefly for local reasons. The attention to the primacy of the local suggests following four points: one, that the localist solution to arguably the biggest challenge thrown up by intensive industrialization and urbanization, circumstances; two, that the gradual inclusion of poor men and women at the local level and not simply their formal exclusion at the national level; three, that it was the locality and not the central state that became the chief site where collectivism and national efficiency exerted itself and was contested; four, that the obsession with imperial identity needs to be tempered by an appreciation for the enduring power of the local, which probably did more to block than to facilitate awareness.

This article argues that 'community eclipse' theorized by Chicago ecological sociologists is not caused 'naturally', but by the constellation of economic, socio-cultural and political factors. Hong Kong, a former British colony, has undergone urbanization-cum-industrialization and experienced a demise of community spirit. Industrialization set the stage for urbanization, while the property-led economy spurred unscrupulous urban renewal. Government public housing and new town policies spurred urban sprawl, disrupted pre-existent communities and uprooted the residents. The local people attended to 'capitalistic consciousness' and pragmatic concerns rather than communitarian precepts. Social capital should be nurtured in revitalizing the eclipsed communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]