British Economic and Social History
Author: R. C. Richardson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780719036002
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The Vital Century
Author: John Rule
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-06
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 1317870700
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLong neglected, the Eighteenth Century is now the focus for much of the most exciting work in history today. This new research has so altered and expanded our understanding of the Georgian economy that some historians now question the very idea of an `Industrial Revolution'. John Rule uses the latest scholarship for a comprehensive and magisterial review -- of population, output, agriculture, manufacture, labour, communications, towns, finance and domestic and overseas markets -- through which he reassesses the `vital century' in which the contours of the modern economy first emerge to view. An analytical survey which offers the first comprehensive economic history of the C.18th.
A Social History of England, 1500–1750
Author: Keith Wrightson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-02-13
Total Pages: 435
ISBN-13: 1108210201
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe rise of social history has had a transforming influence on the history of early modern England. It has broadened the historical agenda to include many previously little-studied, or wholly neglected, dimensions of the English past. It has also provided a fuller context for understanding more established themes in the political, religious, economic and intellectual histories of the period. This volume serves two main purposes. Firstly, it summarises, in an accessible way, the principal findings of forty years of research on English society in this period, providing a comprehensive overview of social and cultural change in an era vital to the development of English social identities. Second, the chapters, by leading experts, also stimulate fresh thinking by not only taking stock of current knowledge but also extending it, identifying problems, proposing fresh interpretations and pointing to unexplored possibilities. It will be essential reading for students, teachers and general readers.
Harmony and the Balance
Author: Andrea Lynne Finkelstein
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2009-12-21
Total Pages: 392
ISBN-13: 0472023845
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrequently the achievements of pioneering economic writers are assessed by imposing contemporary theories of markets, economics, politics, and history. At last, here is a book that appraises the work of the leading English economic writers of the seventeenth century using intellectual concepts of the time, rather than present-day analytical models, in order to place their economic theories in context. In an analysis that tracks the Stuart century, Andrea Finkelstein traces the progress of such figures as Gerard de Malynes, William Petty, John Locke, and Charles Davenant by inviting us into the great trading companies and halls of parliament where we relive the debates over the coinage, the interest rate, and the nature of money. Furthermore, we see them model their works on the latest developments in physiology, borrow ideas from bookkeeping, and argue over the nature of numbers in an effort to construct a market theory grounded in objective moral value. This comprehensive approach clarifies the relationship between the century's economic ideas and its intellectual thought so that, in the end, readers will be able to judge for themselves whether this really was the age of the Capitalist Geist. Finkelstein has crafted her book to be both inclusive and interdisciplinary by skillfully integrating biography, political history, economic history, and intellectual theory as well as the economic heritage of its subjects. While the concepts are far from simple, Finkelstein's adroit style presents her analysis in an extremely accessible manner. Andrea Finkelstein is Assistant Professor of History, City University of New York.
Law and Society in England 1750-1950
Author: William Cornish
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-10-31
Total Pages: 781
ISBN-13: 1509931252
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLaw and Society in England 1750–1950 is an indispensable text for those wishing to study English legal history and to understand the foundations of the modern British state. In this new updated edition the authors explore the complex relationship between legal and social change. They consider the ways in which those in power themselves imagined and initiated reform and the ways in which they were obliged to respond to demands for change from outside the legal and political classes. What emerges is a lively and critical account of the evolution of modern rights and expectations, and an engaging study of the formation of contemporary social, administrative and legal institutions and ideas, and the road that was travelled to create them. The book is divided into eight chapters: Institutions and Ideas; Land; Commerce and Industry; Labour Relations; The Family; Poverty and Education; Accidents; and Crime. This extensively referenced analysis of modern social and legal history will be invaluable to students and teachers of English law, political science, and social history.
Shakespeare's Money
Author: Robert Bearman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-04-07
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13: 0191077062
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThere is no doubting Shakespeare's literary genius, immortalised in his published work. However, statements along these lines are frequently followed by laments of how little is known about this life. This is true if we wish to know about Shakespeare's movements on even a month-by-month basis, or about his working practices and relationships with his theatrical fellows. However, too great an emphasis on this dearth of material not only leads to ill-informed comment that this is somehow 'suspicious' but also tends to downgrade the importance of what material has survived, often dismissed instead simply as evidence of his business dealings which have little bearing on his creative work. However, this material does at least help us to evaluate how successful Shakespeare was in earning a living in a profession which, in his day, was far from mainstream. By calculating his income from theatrical sources and exploring how this affected his financial circumstances and his ability to invest for his and his family's security, we can come to a better understanding of his social standing at different periods in his life, the most obvious evidence to his late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century contemporaries of his success. Shakespeare undoubtedly died a man of comfortable means, but, as this book demonstrates, there is little to justify claims that he died possessed of great wealth. The circumstances of his daughters' marriages are a sufficient indication that he had not achieved true gentlemanly status. Other evidence suggests that he had not broken convincingly into the ranks of leading figures even of a small market town. Moreover, following a period of increasing prosperity, these 'business records' also reflect a declining income during the last ten years or so of his life and of his efforts to safeguard his assets. On the other hand, when compared with his father's business failure, mainly the result of a loss of credit, it is clear that, consciously or unconsciously, Shakespeare had the good sense or foresight not to over-reach himself.
The Making of the English Middle Class
Author: Peter Earle
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1989-01-01
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13: 9780520068261
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is the first major study of a neglected yet extremely significant subject: the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730, a period in which they created a society and economy that can be seen with hindsight to have ushered in the modern world. Using a wealth of material from contemporary sources--including wills, business papers, inventories, marriage contracts, divorce hearings, and the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys--Peter Earle presents a fully rounded picture of the "middling sort of people," getting to the hearts of their lives as men and women struggling for success in the biggest, richest, and most middle-class city in contemporary Europe. He examines in fascinating and convincing detail the business life of Londoners, from apprenticeship through the problems and potential rewards of different occupational groups, going on to look at middle-class family, social, political and material life--from relationships with spouses, children, servants, and neighbors, to food and clothes and furniture, to sickness, death, and burial. Stimulating, scholarly, and constantly illuminating, this book is an important and impressive contribution to English social history.
Just Price in the Markets
Author: Charles R. Geisst
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2023-08-22
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 0300274556
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA concise history of “just price,” from Aristotle to the present day The question of what constitutes a fair price has been at the center of market interactions since the time of Aristotle. Should a seller sell to the highest bidder, or is there some other standard, such as a morally defined price, to be applied? Charles R. Geisst traces the ways that philosophers, religious leaders, and economists have sought to answer that question, from antiquity through the modern era. Aristotle’s thinking on usury influenced the idea of pricing well into the Renaissance. In his view, money was barren and should not be used to beget more money. As trade became more extensive, the strictures placed on pricing by Aristotelian thinking began to fall away, replaced by Roman and common-law conceptions of value and interest. Geisst’s book follows the evolution of that thought—influenced along the way by figures such as Copernicus, Fibonacci, Adam Smith, Marx, Cassel, and Keynes—and charts parallel developments in European and Islamic notions of fair pricing. Today, pricing is seen as an economic inevitability, dictated by the laws of supply and demand. But this has not always been the case. As Geisst argues, the idea of a just price was once a moral concept, long before it was an economic one.
James Madison
Author: Samuel Kernell
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 0804752303
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn recent years, the study of James Madison and his contributions to early American politics has enjoyed a growing audience among scholars and students of modern American politics. Not only did Madison establish the fundamental American concept of pluralism, his appreciation of the logic of institutional design as a key to successful democratic reform still influences modern theory and research. This book evaluates the legacy of James Madison as the product of a scholarly politiciana politician who thought carefully about institutions in the context of action. It brings together thoughtful responses to Madison and his theory from a broad cross-section of modern political science, and views Madison not as an icon or mouthpiece of an era, but as a modern political scientist who was able to implement many of his theoretical ideas in a practical forum.
Owning the Earth
Author: Andro Linklater
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2014-01-01
Total Pages: 497
ISBN-13: 1408815745
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBarely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consigned to history as a result of the most creative - and, at the same time, destructive - cultural force in the modern era: the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land. This notion laid waste to traditional communal civilisations, displacing entire peoples from their homelands, and brought into being a unique concept of individual freedom and a distinct form of representative government and democratic institutions. Other great civilizations, in Russia, China, and the Islamic world, evolved very different structures of land ownership, and thus very different forms of government and social responsibility.The seventeenth-century English surveyor William Petty was the first man to recognise the connection between private property and free-market capitalism; the American radical Wolf Ladejinsky redistributed land in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea after the Second World War to make possible the emergence of Asian tiger economies. Through the eyes of these remarkable individuals and many more, including Chinese emperors and German peasants, Andro Linklater here presents the evolution of land ownership to offer a radically new view of mankind's place on the planet.
