Boydell Press出版的People, Markets, Goods: Economies and Societies in History丛书，最早发行于2013年。最新的一本于2023年5月问世，且提供免费的电子版，可随意阅览或下载。

丛书详情可见出版社官方网站:

https://boydellandbrewer.com/search-results/?series=byd10-people-markets-goods-economies-and-societies-in-history&amount=24

Labour Laws in Preindustrial Europe

The Coercion and Regulation of Wage Labour, c.1350-1850

Jane Whittle, Thijs Lambrecht

ISBN: 9781783277681

Published: May 2023

Many economic historians have assumed that labour in Western Europe was 'free' after the end of serfdom in the fifteenth century. These assumptions are increasingly being questioned and labour laws have been identified as creating significant restrictions on workers' freedom. This collection is the first book to look at labour laws across Western Europe from a longer-term perspective. It is interdisciplinary in nature bringing together studies in social, political, economic and legal history.

Elements of labour legislation appeared before the Black Death, but were strengthened afterwards particularly in places and periods where labour became scarce. The collection focuses on the rural economy in the late medieval and early modern period. It provides a series of studies which introduce a range of approaches to labour regulation and the very idea of labour across Europe. Uniquely, the collection offers observations on the impact of labour laws on everyday social relations. Attempts to regulate work and labour varied widely: in places they amounted to wishful thinking on the part of the regional authorities, whereas elsewhere they could impose severe limitations on individual freedoms.

Contributors: Davide Cristoferi, Theresa Johnsson, Thijs Lambrecht, Charmian Mansell, Francine Michaud, Hanne Østhus, Raffaella Sarti, Carolina Uppenberg and Jane Whittle.

Access：Open access on https://openaccess.boydellandbrewercms.com/publications/-256957/labour-laws-in-preindustrial-europe?configid=200018

Family Firms in Postwar Britain and Germany

Competing Approaches to Business

by David Paulson

ISBN: 9781783277582

Published: February 2023

This is the first book length study that examines the detailed histories of SMEs in a comparative, transnational manner. Emerging from this study is an evaluation of German and British varieties of capitalism in action, showing that they were not fixed or static, but rather have changed considerably as they evolved over time.

The German companies studied formed part of the Mittelstand, the family-owned sector which is unique to German-speaking countries. This book explores whether the principles of a close identification with the surrounding region and a patriarchal culture within a 'family' atmosphere were adopted in practice then, and whether they are still applicable today.

Paulson compares the Mittelstand to British SMEs in order to understand how their approach differed from that of their German counterparts. For both countries, the 'ecosystem' which surrounded businesses is examined, paying particular attention to funding and vocational education. The book concludes that the potential for a British Mittelstand existed, but that British companies were often less well managed and had to operate within a less supportive external environment than that which favoured the Mittelstand.

Historical lessons learned from the management of these companies still resonate today, and can help us to understand contemporary differences in business performance. This book will therefore be of interest to scholars and students of twentieth-century business and economic history, as well as management studies.

The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain’s Financial Crisis

by Charles Read

ISBN: 9781783277278

Published: October 2022

The Irish famine of the 1840s is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the United Kingdom's history. Within six years of the arrival of the potato blight in Ireland in 1845, more than a quarter of its residents had unexpectedly died or emigrated. Its population has not yet fully recovered since.

Historians have struggled to explain why the British government decided to shut down its centrally organised relief efforts in 1847, long before the famine ended. Some have blamed the laissez-faire attitudes of the time for an inadequate response by the British government; others have alleged purposeful neglect and genocide. In contrast, The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain's Financial Crisis uncovers a hidden narrative of the crisis, which links policy failure in Ireland to financial and political instability in Great Britain. More important than a laissez-faire ideology in hindering relief efforts for Ireland were the British government's lack of a Parliamentary majority from 1846, the financial crises of 1847, and a battle of ideas over monetary policy between proponents and opponents of financial orthodoxy. The high death toll in Ireland resulted from the British government's plans for intervention going awry, rather than being prematurely cancelled because of laissez-faire.

This book is essential reading for scholars, students and anyone interested in Anglo-Irish relations, the history of financial crises and famines, and why humanitarian-relief efforts can go wrong even with good intentions.

Quakers in the British Atlantic World, c.1660-1800

By Esther Sahle

ISBN:9781783275861

Published: May 2021

The book studies the two largest Quaker communities in the early modern British Atlantic World, London and Philadelphia. It looks at the origins of the Society of Friends in mid seventeenth century England and follows its development into a well organised sect with a sophisticated organisational structure spreading across the Atlantic world. The book zooms in on the Quaker communities in these two important port cities, as well as their relationships with non-Quaker inhabitants. It scrutinizes the role of Quaker merchants and the business ethics they followed.

Drawing on many unpublished sources, the study is able to portray a mid-eighteenth-century crisis for the Quaker communities when sanctions for offences against the prevailing disciplines in business (fraud, debt, bankruptcy) and marriage increased dramatically. And yet these Quaker communities got likewise caught up in wider political developments across the British Empire. In the course of a series of conflicts affecting colonial Pennsylvania in the mid eighteenth century, the Society of Friends suffered grave reputational damage. The public in England and Pennsylvania began to perceive Quakers as a sect that put its own agenda and interest over the welfare of the colonial population and the Empire. In turn, these developments led to a "Quaker reformation" and Quaker identity became guided by new principles: honesty in business and religious marital endogamy. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of economic and Atlantic history, as well as Eighteenth-Century studies and religious history.

Financing Cotton

British Industrial Growth and Decline, 1780-2000

by Steven Toms

ISBN: 9781783275090

Published: June 2020

The cotton and textile industry, at the centre of the industrial revolution, has long been a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain as a manufacturing economy. This book links the world of finance directly to the fate of the cotton and textile industry for the first time. Using a unique underlying data-set drawn from financial business records of over 100 cotton and textile-manufacturing firms based in Lancashire, and ranging from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century, Financing Cotton analyses the dynamics of industrial capitalism by uncovering the interaction between financial systems and technological development and innovation. It offers new perspectives on business practices and their evolution, as well as decisions taken by entrepreneurs, managers and employees. The book broadly investigates five questions: how and why were individual firms profitable and what happened to these profits; how did the firms' financial structure and performance influence their attitudes to employment regulation; what were the effects of financial networks and institutions on the characteristics of the first and second phase of industrialisation; how did the financial system enable or stifle entrepreneurship and investment in new technology and, finally, why did consolidation and industrial restructuring offer survival options for some firms, but not for others?

Globalized Peripheries

Central Europe and the Atlantic World, 1680-1860

Edited by Jutta Wimmler and Klaus Weber

ISBN: 9781783274758

Published: June 2020

The early modern Atlantic world, with its flows of bullion, of free and unfree labourers, of colonial produce and of manufactures from Europe and Asia, with mercantile networks and rent-seeking capital, has to date been described almost entirely as the preserve of the Western sea powers. More recent scholarship has rediscovered the dense entanglements with Central and Eastern Europe. Globalized Peripheries goes further by looking beyond slavery and American plantations. Contributions look at the trading practices and networks of merchants established in Central and Eastern Europe, investigate commodity flows between these regions and the Atlantic world, and explore the production of export commodities, two-way migration as well as financial ties. The volume uncovers new economic and financial connections between Prussia, the Habsburg Empire, Russia, as well as northern and western Germany with the Atlantic world. Its period coverage connects the end of the early modern world with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Women and the Land, 1500-1900

Edited by Amanda L. Capern, Briony McDonagh and Jennifer Aston

ISBN: 9781783273980

Published: November 2019

Women and the Land examines the pre-history of gendered property relations in England, focusing on the four-hundred-year period between roughly 1500 and 1900. More specifically, the book is about how gender shaped opportunities for and experiences of owning property, particularly for women. The focus is especially on land, residential buildings and commercial property, but livestock, common and personal property also feature. This project is drivenby an explicitly feminist agenda: the contributors directly challenge the idea that the existence of patriarchal property relations - including the doctrine of coverture and gendered inheritance practices - meant that property wasconcentrated in exclusively male hands. Here a very different story is told: of significant levels of female landownership and how women's desire to own property and manage its profits led to emotional attachments to land and a willingness and determination to fight for the right to legal title. Altogether, the chapters in this volume offer new histories of land and property which hold women's lives as their centre. Presenting the very latest qualitativeand quantitative research on women's landownership, the book will be of interest to those working in social, economic and cultural history, historical and cultural geography, women's studies, gender studies and landscape studies.

AMANDA CAPERN is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Women's History at the University of Hull.

BRIONY MCDONAGH is Senior Lecturer in Historical and Cultural Geography at the University of Hull.

JENNIFER ASTON is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Northumbria University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jennifer Aston, Stephen Bending, Amanda L. Capern, Janet Casson, Amy Erickson, Amanda Flather, Joan Heggie, Jessica L. Malay, Briony McDonagh, Judith Spicksley, Jon Stobart, Hannah Worthen

Money and Markets

Essays in Honour of Martin Daunton

Edited by Julian Hoppit, Duncan Needham and Adrian Leonard

ISBN: 9781783274451

Published: November 2019

Money and Markets celebrates Martin Daunton's distinguished career by bringing together essays from leading economic, social and cultural historians, many being colleagues and former students. Throughout his career, Dauntonhas focused on the relationship between structure and agency, how institutional structures create capacities and path dependencies, and how institutions are themselves shaped by agency and contingency - what Braudel referred to as 'turning the hour glass twice'.

This volume reflects that focus, combining new research on the financing of the British fiscal-military state before and during the Napoleonic wars, its property institutions, and thelonger-term economic consequences of Sir Robert Peel. There are also chapters on the birth of the Eurodollar market, Conservative fiscal policy from the 1960s to the 1980s, the impact of neoliberalism on welfare policy and more broadly, the failed attempt to build an airport in the Thames Estuary in the 1970s, and the political economy of time in Britain since 1945. While much of the focus is on Britain, and British finance in a global economy, the volumealso reflects Daunton's more recent study of international political economy with essays on the French contribution to nineteenth-century globalization, Prussian state finances at the time of the 1848 revolution, Imperial German monetary policy, the role of international charity in the mixed economy of welfare and neoliberal governance, and the material politics of energy consumption from the 1930s to the 1960s.

JULIAN HOPPIT is Astor Professor of British History at University College London.

ADRIAN LEONARD is Associate Director of the Centre for Financial History at the University of Cambridge.

DUNCAN NEEDHAM is Dean and Senior Tutor at Darwin College, University of Cambridge.

CONTRIBUTORS: Martin Chick, Sean Eddie, Matthew Hilton, Julian Hoppit, Seung-Woo Kim, Adrian Leonard, Duncan Needham, Charles Read, Bernhard Rieger, Richard Rodger, Sabine Schneider, HirokiShin, David Todd, James Tomlinson, Frank Trentmann, Adrian Williamson

Shoplifting in Eighteenth-Century England

by Shelley Tickell

ISBN: 9781783273287

Published: August 2018

Shoplifting in Eighteenth-Century England examines the nature and impact on society of this commercial crime at a time of rapid retail expansion during the long eighteenth century. As a new consumer culture took root in England and shops proliferated, the crime of shoplifting leaped to public prominence. In 1699 shoplifting became a hanging offence. Yet whether compelled by need or greed, shoplifters continued to operate in substantial numbers on the shopping streets of London and provincial towns. Regarded initially as exclusively a crime of the poor, the eighteenth century witnessed a transformation in the public perception and understanding of such customer theft, signalled by the shocking arrest of Jane Austen's wealthy aunt for shoplifting in 1799.

This book shows, through systematic profiling of those who committed this crime, that shoplifting was primarily a crime of the poor and predominantly an opportunist one. Providing both quantitative analysis and engaging insights into real-life stories, the book describes the variable strategies adopted by shoplifters to raid elite and poorer stores, the practical responses of shopkeepers to this predation and the financial impact on their businesses. It investigates the trade lobbying that led to the passing of the Shoplifting Act, the degree to which retailers co-operated with the judiciary and their engagement with the capital law reform movement of the later eighteenth century. Examining the range of goods stolen, the book also addresses questions of whether or not this form of theft was driven by consumer desire andsuggests that more subtle social and economic motives were at work.

SHELLEY TICKELL is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire

The Age of Machinery

Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770-1850

by Gillian Cookson

ISBN: 9781783272761

Published: February 2018

The engineers who built the first generations of modern textile machines, between 1770 and 1850, pushed at the boundaries of possibility. This book investigates these pioneering machine-makers, almost all working within textile communities in northern England, and the industry they created. It probes their origins and skills, the sources of their inspiration and impetus, and how it was possible to develop a high-tech, factory-centred, world-leading marketin textile machinery virtually from scratch. The story of textile engineering defies classical assumptions about the driving forces behind the Industrial Revolution. The circumstances of its birth, and the personal affiliationsat work during periods of exceptional creativity, suggest that the potential to accelerate economic growth could be found within social assets and craft skills. Appreciating textile engineering within its own time and context challenges views inherited from Victorian thinkers, who tended to ascribe to it features of the fully fledged industry they saw before them. The Age of Machinery is an engagingly written account of the trade in its key northern centres, devoid of jargon and yet tightly argued, equally rich with historical narrative and analysis. It will be invaluable not only to students and scholars of British economic history and the Industrial Revolution but also tosocial scientists looking at human agency and its contribution to economic growth and innovation.

GILLIAN COOKSON holds a DPhil in economic history and has been employed since 1995 in academic research and consultancy,including as county editor, Victoria County History of Durham.

Servants in Rural Europe

1400-1900

Edited by Jane Whittle

ISBN: 9781783272396

Published: November 2017

This is the first book to survey the experience of servants in rural Europe from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Live-in servants were a distinctive element of early modern society. They were typically young adults aged between 16 and 24 who lived and worked in other people's households before marriage. Servants tended to be employed for long periods, several months to years at a time, and were paid with food and lodging as well as cash wages. Both women and men worked as servants in large numbers. Unlike domestic servants in towns and wealthy households, rural servants typically worked on farms and were an important element of the agricultural workforce. Historians have viewed service as a distinct life-cycle stage between childhood and marriage. It brought both freedom and servility for young people. It allowed them to leave home and earn a living before marriage, whilst learning a range of agricultural and craft skills which reduced their dependence on their parents and increased their choice in marriage partners. Still, servants had limited rights: they were under the authority of their employer, with a similar legal status to children. In many countries the employment of servants was tightly controlled by law. Servants could demand their wages, and leave when the contract ended, but had to work long hours and had little say in their work tasksduring employment. While some servants effectively became family members, trusted and cared for, others were abused physically and sexually by their employers. This collection features a range of methodologies, reflecting the variety of source materials and approaches available to historians of this topic in a range of European countries and time periods. Nonetheless, it demonstrates the strong common themes that emerge from studying servants and will be of particular interest to historians of work, gender, the family, agriculture, economic development, youth and social structure.

JANE WHITTLE is Professor of Rural History at the University of Exeter.

Contributors: CHRISTINE FERTIG, JEREMY HAYHOE, SARAH HOLLAND, THIJS LAMBRECHT, CHARMIAN MANSELL, HANNE ØSTHUS, RICHARD PAPING, CRISTINA PRYTZ, RAFFAELLA SARTI, CAROLINA UPPENBERG, LIES VERVAET, JANE WHITTLE

Cameralism in Practice

State Administration and Economy in Early Modern Europe

Edited by Marten Seppel and Keith Tribe

ISBN: 9781783272280

Published: October 2017

This book discusses the impact of cameralism on the practices of governance, early modern state-building and economy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. It argues that the cameralist conception of state and economy - aform of 'science' of government dedicated to reforming society while promoting economic development, and often associated mainly with Prussia - had significant impact far beyond Germany and Austria. In fact, its influence spread into Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Portugal, Northern Italy and other parts of Europe. In this volume, an international set of experts discusses administrative practices and policies in relation to population, forestry, proto-industry,trade, mining affairs, education, police regulation, and insurance. The book will appeal to early modernists, economic historians and historians of economic thought.

MARTEN SEPPEL is Associate Professor of Early ModernHistory at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. KEITH TRIBE has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and taught at the University of Keele (UK) from 1976 to 2002, retiring as Reader in Economics. He is now working as a highly regarded professional translator and independent scholar. Forthcoming work includes a new translation of Max Weber, Economy and Society Part One (Harvard University Press, 2018). His publications include Strategies of Economic Order (CUP, 1995/2007); The Economy of the Word. Language, History, and Economics (OUP, 2015); and (edited with Pat Hudson) The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Agenda, 2016).

Contributors: ROGER BARTLETT, ALEXANDRE MENDES CUNHA, HANS FRAMBACH, GUILLAUME GARNER, LARS MAGNUSSON, INGRID MARKUSSEN, FRANK OBERHOLZNER, GÖRAN RYDÉN, MARTEN SEPPEL, KEITH TRIBE, PAUL WARDE

Slavery Hinterland

Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680-1850

Edited by Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft

ISBN: 9781783271122

Published: June 2016

Slavery Hinterland explores a neglected aspect of transatlantic slavery: the implication of a continental European hinterland. It focuses on historical actors in territories that were not directly involved in the traffic inAfricans but linked in various ways with the transatlantic slave business, the plantation economies that it fed and the consequences of its abolition. The volume unearths material entanglements of the Continental and Atlantic economies and also proposes a new agenda for the historical study of the relationship between business and morality. Contributors from the US, Britain and continental Europe examine the ways in which the slave economy touched on individual lives and economic developments in German-speaking Europe, Switzerland, Denmark and Italy. They reveal how these 'hinterlands' served as suppliers of investment, labour and trade goods for the slave trade and of materials for the plantation economies, and how involvement in trade networks contributed in turn to key economic developments in the 'hinterlands'. The chapters range in time from the first, short-lived attempt at establishing a German slave-trading operation in the 1680s to the involvement of textile manufacturers in transatlantic trade in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. A key theme of the volume is the question of conscience, or awareness of being morally implicated in an immoral enterprise. Evidence for subjective understandings of the moral challenge of slavery is found in individual actions and statements and also in post-abolition colonisation and missionary projects.

FELIX BRAHM is Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in London.

EVE ROSENHAFT is Professor of German Historical Studies, University of Liverpool.

CONTRIBUTORS: Felix Brahm, Peter Haenger, Catherine Hall, Daniel P. Hopkins, Craig Koslofsky, Sarah Lentz, Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, Anne Sophie Overkamp, Alexandra Robinson, Eve Rosenhaft, Anka Steffen, Klaus Weber, Roberto Zaugg

Almshouses in Early Modern England

Charitable Housing in the Mixed Economy of Welfare, 1550-1725

by Angela Nicholls

ISBN: 9781783271788

Published: March 2017

Almshouses providing accommodation for poor people are a common feature of the towns and villages of England, visible representations of historic attitudes towards the poor. The period after the Reformation saw not only the survival of many medieval institutions but also a remarkable number of new foundations, as people from many different backgrounds used their wealth to revive and remodel this ancient form of provision to meet new needs. This book addresses a neglected element of English welfare history, examining the role and significance of English almshouses in the period 1550 - 1725 and the contribution they made within the developing welfare systems of the time.

Drawing on archival evidence, the book analyses why almshouses were founded and the reasons for the continuing popularity of this particular form of charity; who the occupants were; what benefits they received; and how residents wereexpected to live their lives. It challenges the assumption that Post-Reformation almshouses were places of privilege for the respectable deserving poor and reveals a surprising variation in the socio-economic status of almspeopleand their experience of almshouse life. The book places these findings in the context of the contemporary national and local debates about poverty and poor relief and argues that early modern almshouses took on a distinct and newidentity within the changed landscape of relief provision in post-Reformation England. Many almshouses played an integral role in the early welfare provision of their local communities, yet, ultimately, their significance was affected by the emergence of harsher public provision in the new workhouses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

ANGELA NICHOLLS is Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick

People, Places and Business Cultures

Essays in Honour of Francesca Carnevali

Edited by Paolo Di Martino, Andrew Popp and Peter Scott

ISBN: 9781783272129

Published: March 2017

This collection brings together new research into nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and European economic history, socio-cultural history and business history. It is inspired by the work and legacy of Francesca Carnevali who, throughout her career, encouraged a lively dialogue between these different disciplines. The book offers innovative views and perspectives on key debates and emphasises the connections between economic environments and wider social and cultural elements. It also considers methodological issues and emerging approaches in economic history. Topics include banks and business finance in the nineteenth century, mass-market retailing and class demarcations, economic microhistory, and comparative history and capitalism. Economic, business, social and cultural historians alike will find it of interest.

PAOLO DI MARTINO is Senior Lecturer in International Business History at the Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham.

ANDREW POPP is Professor of Business History at the University of Liverpool.

PETER SCOTT is Professor of International Business History at the University of Reading's Henley Business School and Director of Henley's Centre for International Business History.

CONTRIBUTORS: Andrea Colli, Paolo Di Martino, Leslie Hannah, Matthew Hilton, Ken Lipartito, Lucy Newton, Andrew Popp, Peter Scott, Anna Spadavecchia, James Walker, Chris Wickham

Crises in Economic and Social History

A Comparative Perspective

Edited by A.T. Brown, Andy Burn and Rob Doherty

ISBN: 9781783270422

Published: November 2015

This collection of essays brings together historians examining social and economic crises from the thirteenth century to the twenty-first. Crisis is an almost ubiquitous concept for historians, applicable across (amongst others) the histories of agriculture, disease, finance and trade. Yet there has been little attempt to compare its use as an explanatory tool between these discrete fields of research. This volume breaks down the boundaries between traditional historical time periods and sub-disciplines of history to examine the ways in which past societies have coped with crises, and the role of crisis in generating economic and social change.

Should we conceptualise a medieval agrarian or financial crisis differently from their modern counterparts? Were there similarities in how contemporaries responded to famine or outbreaks of disease? How comparable are crises within households, within institutions, or across national and international networks of trade? Contributors examine how crises have shaped economic and social life in a range of studies from the Great Depression in 1930s Latin America to the outbreak of plague in seventeenth-century central Europe, and from sheep and cattle murrain in fourteenth-century England to the Northern Rock building society collapse of 2007.

A.T. BROWN is an Addison Wheeler Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University.

ANDY BURN is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University.

ROB DOHERTY is a doctoral candidate in history at DurhamUniversity.

CONTRIBUTORS: Peter H. Bent, A.T. Brown, Andy Burn, Catherine Casson, Mark Casson, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Rob Doherty, Josette Duncan, Matthew Hollow, Pavla Jirková, Alan Knight, John S. Lee, Cinzia Lorandini,John Martin, Ranald Michie, Anne L. Murphy, Pamela Nightingale, John Singleton, Philip Slavin, Paul Warde

Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780-1850

by Peter Kirby

ISBN: 9781843838845

Published: September 2013

Historians have long recognised the importance of child health during the Industrial Revolution, but few have explored the health of working children in any analytical detail. In this comprehensive study, Peter Kirby places the occupational health of employed children within a broad context of social, industrial and environmental change during the period 1780 to 1850. The book explores the deformities, fevers, respiratory complaints, industrial injuries and physical ill-treatment which have long been associated with child labour in the factory workplace. The result is a more nuanced picture of child health and child labour during the classic 'factory age' which raises important questions about the enduring stereotype of the health-impaired and abused industrial child.

Peter Kirby is Professor of Social History and Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England

by James Raven

ISBN: 9781843839101

Published: September 2014

Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England assesses the contribution of the business press and the publication of print to the economic transformation of England. The impact of non-book printing has been long neglected. A raft of jobbing work serviced commerce and finance while many more practical guides and more ephemeral pamphlets on trade and investment were read than the books that we now associate with the foundations of modern politicaleconomy. A pivotal change in the book trades, apparent from the late seventeenth century, was the increased separation of printers from bookseller-publishers, from the skilled artisan to the bookseller-financier who might have noprior training in the printing house but who took up the sale of publications as another commodity. This book examines the broader social relationship between publication and the practical conduct of trade; the book asks what itmeant to be 'published' and how print, text and image related to the involvement of script.

The age of Enlightenment was an age of astonishing commercial and financial transformation offering printers and the business press new market opportunities. Print helped to effect a business revolution. The reliability, reputation, regularity, authority and familiarity of print increased trust and confidence and changed attitudes and behaviours. New modes of publication and the wide-ranging products of printing houses had huge implications for the way lives were managed, regulated and recorded.

JAMES RAVEN is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College Cambridge.

The First Century of Welfare

Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, 1620-1730

by Jonathan Healey

ISBN: 9781843839569

Published: September 2014

The English 'Old Poor Law' was the first national system of tax-funded social welfare in the world. It provided a safety net for hundreds of thousands of paupers at a time of very limited national wealth and productivity. The First Century of Welfare, which focusses on the poor, but developing, county of Lancashire, provides the first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century. Drawing on thousands of individual petitions for poor relief, presented by paupers themselves to magistrates, it peers into the social and economic world of England's marginal people. Taken together, these records present a vivid and sobering picture of the daily lives and struggles of the poor. We can see how their family life, their relations with their kin and their neighbours, and the dictates of contemporary gender norms conditioned their lives. We can also see how they experienced illness and physical and mental disability; and the ways in which real people's lives could be devastated by dearth, trade depression, and the destruction of the Civil Wars. But the picture is not just one of poor folk tossed by the tidesof fortune. It is also one of agency: about the strategies of economic survival the poor adopted, particularly in the context of a developing industrial economy, of the support they gained from their relatives and neighbours, andof their willingness to engage with England's developing system of social welfare to ensure that they and their families did not go hungry. In this book, an intensely human picture surfaces of what it was like to experience poverty at a time when the seeds of state social welfare were being planted.

JONATHAN HEALEY is University Lecturer in English Local and Social History and Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440-1660

Tawney's Agrarian Problem Revisited

Edited by Jane Whittle

ISBN: 9781843838500

Published: August 2013

This volume revisits a classic book by a famous historian: R.H. Tawney's Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912). Tawney's Agrarian Problem surveyed landlord-tenant relations in England between 1440 and 1660, the period of emergent capitalism and rapidly changing property relations that stands between the end of serfdom and the more firmly capitalist system of the eighteenth century. This transition period is widely recognised as crucial to Britain's long term economic development, laying the foundation for the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. Remarkably, Tawney's book has remained the standard text on landlord-tenant relations for over a century.

Here, Tawney's book is re-evaluated by leading experts in agrarian and legal history, taking its themes as a departure point to provide for a new interpretation of the agrarian economy in late Tudor and early modern Britain. The introduction looks at how Tawney's Agrarian Problem was written, its place in the historiography of agrarian England and the current state of research. Survey chapters examine the late medieval period, a comparison with Scotland, and Tawney's conception of capitalism, whilst the remaining chapters focus on four issues that were central to Tawney's arguments: enclosure disputes, the security of customary tenure; the conversion of customarytenure to leasehold; and other landlord strategies to raise revenues. The balance of power between landlords and tenants determined how the wealth of agrarian England was divided in this crucial period of economic development - this book reveals how this struggle was played out.

JANE WHITTLE is professor of rural history at Exeter University.

Contributors: Christopher Brooks, Christopher Dyer, Heather Falvey, Harold Garrett-Goodyear, Julian Goodare, Elizabeth Griffiths, Jennifer Holt, Briony McDonagh, Jean Morrin, David Ormrod, William D. Shannon, Jane Whittle, Andy Wood. Foreword by Keith Wrightson

Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Britain, 1290-1834

Edited by Chris Briggs, P. M. Kitson and S. J. Thompson

ISBN: 9781843839552

Published: December 2014

Population, Welfare and Economic Change presents the latest research on the causes and consequences of British population change from the medieval period to the eve of the Industrial Revolution, in both town and countryside. Its overarching concern is with the economic and demographic decision-making of individuals and groups and the extent to which these were constrained by institutions and resources. Within this, the volume's particular focus is on population growth: its causes and the welfare challenges it posed. Several chapters investigate the success with which the English Old Poor Law provided care for the poor and elderly, and new work on alternative welfare institutions, such as almshouses, is also presented.

A further distinctive feature of this book is its comparative perspective. By making systematic comparisons between economic and demographic developments in pre-industrial Britain and those taking place in various regions of contemporary Continental Europe and Russia, several chapters uncover how far Britain in this period was 'different'. Stimulating to experts and students alike, Population, Welfareand Economic Change offers overviews and summaries of the latest scholarship by leading economic historians and historical demographers, alongside detailed case studies which showcase the original research of younger scholars.

Chris Briggs is Lecturer in Medieval British Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. P.M. Kitson is a former Research Associate at the Cambridge Group for the Historyof Population and Social Structure and Bye-Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. S.J. Thompson is a former J.H. Plumb Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Christ's College, Cambridge.

CONTRIBUTORS: Lorraine Barry, Jeremy Boulton, Chris Briggs, Bruce M.S. Campbell, Tracy Dennison, Nigel Goose, R.W. Hoyle, Peter Kitson, Julie Marfany, Rebecca Oakes, Sheilagh Ogilvie, Stephen Thompson, Samantha Williams, Sir Tony Wrigley, Margaret Yates