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This book brings together an unprecedented volume of material to offer a fundamentally new account of the social order in early modern England. The book pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts in response to questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, it is the first study of English society that fully incorporates women; that offers comprehensive coverage of the range of social groups from the gentry to the labouring poor and across the life cycle; and that represents regional variation. The book sheds new light on the conceptualization of wealth and poverty by ordinary people in the early modern past; on the operation of credit in the early modern economy; on gendered divisions of labour and people’s working lives; and on the profound consequences of widening social inequality that redrew social relations and the calculus of esteem in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Black Death of 1348–9 is the most catastrophic event in recorded history, and this study—the Ford Lectures of 2019 at Oxford University—offers a major re-evaluation of its immediate impact and longer-term consequences in England. It draws upon recent inter-disciplinary research into climate and disease; renewed interest among econometricians in the origins of the Little Divergence, whereby economic performance in parts of north-western Europe began to move decisively ahead of the rest of the continent on the pathway to modernity; a close re-reading of case studies of fourteenth-century England; and original new research into manorial and governmental sources. The Black Death is placed within the wider contexts of extreme weather and epidemiological events, the institutional framework of markets and serfdom, and the role of the law in reducing risk and shaping behaviour. The government’s response to the crisis is re-considered to suggest an innovative re-interpretation of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. By 1400 the main effects of plague had worked through the economy and society, and their implications for England’s future precocity are analysed. This study rescues the third quarter of the fourteenth century from a little-understood paradox between plague and revolt, and elevates it to a critical period of profound and irreversible change in English and global history.

In colonial-era Egypt, a new social category of “modern men” emerged, the efendiyya (sg. efendi). Working as bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, free professionals and public intellectuals, the efendis represented new middle class elites. They were the experts who drafted and carried out the state’s modernisation policies, and the makers as well as majority consumers of modern forms of politics and national culture. As simultaneously “authentic” and “modern,” they assumed key political role in the anti-colonial movement and in the building of a modern state both before and after the revolution of 1952. This book tells the story of where did these self-consciously modern men come from, and how did they come to be through multiple social, cultural, and institutional contexts. These contexts included social strategies pursued by “traditional” middling households responding to new opportunities for social mobility; modern schools as (non-exclusive) vehicles for new forms of knowledge opening possibilities to redefine social authority; but they also included new forms of youth culture, student rituals and peer networks, as well as urban popular culture writ large. Through these contexts, a historically novel experience of being an efendi emerged. New social practices (politics, or writing) and new cultural forms and genres (literature, autobiography) were its key sites of self-expression. Through these venues, an efendi culture imbued with a sense of mission, duty, and entitlement was articulated, and defined against and in relation to two main contrastive others: “traditional” society and western modernity-cum-colonial authority. Both represented the efendis’ social, cultural and political nemeses, who, in some contexts, could also become his allies.

This book explores the knowledge underpinnings of agricultural change and growth in early modern Europe, building on the growing recognition among historians that ‘what people knew and believed’ had a bearing on their economic behaviour. Until recently researchers resisted arguments rooted in non-quantitative explanations of economic change which place the emphasis on cultural agents. The book focuses on the period circa 1750–1840 when an unprecedented amount of agricultural information was put into circulation which facilitated its consumption and incorporation into the practices of cereal and animal husbandry. In Scotland, England, and Denmark this precursor Agricultural Enlightenment triggered a modernization of the rural economy which can be labelled an Agricultural Revolution. Elsewhere the impact of the supply of agricultural knowledge was muted and it is hard to separate out the ingredients of the changes under way by the 1830s and 1840s. Adopting a continental perspective on agricultural growth, the book weighs up the effects of cultural factors by analysing the mechanisms governing knowledge production, diffusion, and adoption by farmers. Issues involving the transfer of knowledge and skill receive particular coverage. But equally the book explores the impact of demographic change, urbanization, and evidence that European agriculture was moving towards market-driven production by the end of the period. Governments were as influenced by the knowledge project of the Enlightenment as landlords and their tenants, and the book examines the proposition that institutional change ‘from above’ was the single most powerful catalyst of agricultural growth before industrialization transformed the European economy.

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. However, that countryside may have looked both more and less familiar than we imagine. Take today's startling yellow fields of rapeseed, seemingly more suited to the landscape of Van Gogh than Constable. They were, in fact, thoroughly familiar to fieldworkers in 17th-century England. At the same time, some features that would have gone unremarked in the past now seem like oddities. In the 15th century, rabbit warrens were specially guarded to rear rabbits as a luxury food for rich men's tables; whilst houses had moats not only to defend them, but to provide a source of fresh fish. In the 1500s Catherine of Aragon introduced the concept of a fresh salad to the court of Henry VIII; and in the 1600s, artichoke gardens became a fashion of the gentry in their hope of producing more male heirs. The common tomato, suspected of being poisonous in 1837, was transformed into a household vegetable by the end of the 19th century, thanks to cheaper glass-making methods and the resulting increase in glasshouses. In addition to these images of past lives, the author reveals how the forces that drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture — a glut of meat and cereal crops, changing dietary habits, the needs of medicine — have striking parallels with earlier periods in our history.

Our understanding of Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s is being transformed. For decades, historians were locked in a narrow debate about the degree of central control over the terror process. Recent archival research is underpinning new, innovative approaches and opening new perspectives. Historians are exploring the roots of the Terror in the heritage of war and mass repression in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods; in the regime’s focus not just on former ‘oppositionists’, wreckers, and saboteurs, but also on crime and social disorder; in the common European concern to identify and isolate ‘undesirable’ elements. They are examining in much greater depth and detail the precipitants and triggers that turned a determination to protect the Revolution into a ferocious mass repression. This volume brings together the work of the leading historians of Stalinist Terror in sixteen chapters, paired on eight themes, presenting not only the latest developments in the field, but the latest evolution of the debate. Some pairings reflect the diversity of sources, methodologies, and angles of approach to a given subject. Others show stark differences of opinion. Each is briefly introduced by the authors and because no pairing can exhaust a topic, each is followed by a short list of recommended further readings. These are biased towards books and articles in English for the undergraduates, postgraduates and other students of the Stalin-era who will be the main audience of this book.

Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century. This book uses a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other agricultural products that sustained English economy, society and culture before the Norman Conquest. Part one draws on written and pictorial sources, archaeology, place-names and the history of the English language to discover what crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques were used to produce them. In part two, a series of landscape studies explores how these could have been combined into working agricultural regimes in different parts of the country, using place-names, maps and the landscape itself. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was recognisably the beginning of a tradition that only ended with the Second World War. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, because it had to be, but infinitely adaptable, to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.

This book interleaves the history of post-Independence archaeology in India with the life and times of Madhukar Narhar Deshpande (1920–2008), a leading Indian archaeologist who went on to become the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India. Spanning nearly a century, this is a tale about the circumstances which brought men like Deshpande to this career path; what it was like to grow up in a family devoted to India’s freedom; the watershed moment that created a large cohort that was trained by Mortimer Wheeler, the doyen of British archaeology who headed the Archaeological Survey in the twilight years of the British Raj; the unknown conservation stories around the Gol Gumbad in Bijapur and the Qutb Minar in Delhi; the forgotten story of how the fabric of a historic Hindu shrine, the Badrinath temple, was saved; the chemistry shared by the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the archaeologist, Deshpande at historic cave shrines like Ajanta and Ellora, and; the political and administrative challenges faced by director generals of archaeology. The story is told through a main character—Deshpande himself—some of whose writings have been included here. Equally, there are others who figure in the narrative as it reconstructs and recounts the story of Indian archaeology after 1947 through those lives as also through the institutional history of the Archaeological Survey and the processes that were central to the discoveries it made and the challenges it faced.

Part I of this book is an in-depth examination of the characteristics of the Tuscan aristocracy across the first two and a half centuries of the second millennium, as studied by Italian historians and others working within the Italian tradition: their origins, interests, strategies for survival and exercise of power; the structure and the several levels of aristocracy and how these interrelated; the internal dynamics and perceptions that governed aristocratic life; and the relationship to non-aristocratic sectors of society. It will look at how aristocratic society changed across this period and how far changes were internally generated as opposed to responses from external stimuli. The relationship between the aristocracy and public authority will also be examined. Part II of the book deals with England. The aim here is not a comparative study but to bring insights drawn from Tuscan history and Tuscan historiography into play in understanding the evolution of English society from around the year 1000 to around 1250. This part of the book draws on the breadth of English historiography but is also guided by the Italian experience. The book challenges the interpretative framework within which much English history of this period tends to be written—that is to say the grand narrative which revolves around Magna Carta and English exceptionalism—and seeks to avoid dangers of teleology, of idealism, and of essentialism. By offering a study of the aristocracy across a wide time-frame and with themes drawn from Italian historiography, I hope to obviate these tendencies and to appreciate the aristocracy firmly within its own contexts.

The Atlantic represented a world of opportunity in the 18th century, but it represented division also, separating families across its coasts. Whether due to economic shifts, changing political landscapes, imperial ambitions, or even simply personal tragedy, many families found themselves fractured and disoriented by the growth and later fissure of a larger Atlantic world. Such dislocation posed considerable challenges to all individuals who viewed orderly family relations as both a general and a personal ideal. The more fortunate individuals who thus found themselves ‘all at sea’ were able to use family letters, with attendant emphases on familiarity, sensibility, and credit, in order to remain connected in times and places of great disconnection. Portraying the family as a unified, affectionate, and happy entity in such letters provided a means of surmounting concerns about societies fractured by physical distance, global wars, and increasing social stratification. It could also afford social and economic leverage to individual men and women in certain circumstances. This book explores the lives and letters of these families, revealing the sometimes shocking stories of those divided by sea in a series of microhistories. Ranging across the Anglophone Atlantic, including mainland American colonies and states, Britain, and the British Caribbean, the book argues that it was this expanding Atlantic world — much more than the American Revolution — that reshaped contemporary ideals about families, as much as families themselves reshaped the transatlantic world.

Witches are imaginary creatures. But in Poland as in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. This book tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, the book also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of diabolical sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self‐imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft the book attempts to explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Burton’s Anatomy to Hilliard’s miniatures, melancholy has long been associated with the emotional life of Renaissance England. But what other forms of sadness existed alongside, or even beyond, melancholy, and what kinds of selfhood did they help create? Beyond Melancholy explores the vital distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow, despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul. While most medical and philosophical writings emphasized the physiological and moral dangers of sadness, warning that in its most extreme form it could damage the body and even cause death, new Protestant teachings about the nature of salvation suggested that sadness could in fact be a positive, even transformative, experience, bringing believers closer to God. The result of such dramatically conflicting paradigms was a widespread ambiguity about the value of sadness and a need to clarify its significance through active and wilful interpretation—something this book calls ‘emotive improvisation’. Drawing on a wide range of Renaissance medical, philosophical, religious, and literary texts—including moral treatises on the passions, medical textbooks, mortality records, doctors’ case notes, sermons, theological tracts, devotional poetry, letters, life-writings, ballads, and stage-plays—Beyond Melancholy explores the emotional codes surrounding sadness and the way writers responded to and reinterpreted them. In doing so it demonstrates the value of working across forms of evidence too often divided along disciplinary lines, and the special importance of literary texts to the study of the emotional past.

The early 20th century witnessed a revolution in contraceptive behaviour as the large Victorian family disappeared. This book offers a new perspective on the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that accompanied the emergence of the smaller family in modern Britain. It draws on a range of first-hand evidence, including over 190 oral history interviews, in which individuals born between 1900 and 1930 described their marriages and sexual relationships. It challenges many of the key conditions envisaged by demographers and historians as necessary for any significant reduction in average family size to take place. The book demonstrates that a massive expansion in birth control took place in a society in which sexual ignorance was widespread; that effective family limitation was achieved without the mass adoption of new contraceptive technologies; that traditional methods, such as withdrawal, abstinence, and abortion were often seen as preferable to modern appliances, such as condoms and caps; that communication between spouses was not key to the systematic adoption of contraception; and, above all, that women were not necessarily the driving force behind the prevention of pregnancy. Women frequently avoided involvement in family planning decisions and practices, whereas the vast majority of men in Britain from the interwar period onward viewed the regular use of birth control as a masculine duty. By allowing this generation to speak for themselves, the book produces a rich understanding of the startling social attitudes and complex conjugal dynamics that lay behind the changes in contraceptive behaviour in the 20th century.

From childbirth and baptism through to courtship, weddings, and funerals, every stage in the life-cycle of Tudor and Stuart England was accompanied by ritual. Even under the Protestantism of the reformed Church, the spiritual and social dramas of birth, marriage, and death were graced with elaborate ceremony. Powerful and controversial protocols were in operation, shaped and altered by the influences of the Reformation, the Revolution, and the Restoration. Each of the major rituals was potentially an arena for argument, ambiguity, and dissent. Ideally, as classic rites of passage, these ceremonies worked to bring people together. But they also set up traps into which people could stumble, and tests which not everybody could pass. In practice, ritual performance revealed frictions and fractures that everyday local discourse attempted to hide or to heal. Using first-hand evidence, this book shows how the making and remaking of ritual formed part of a continuing debate, sometimes strained and occasionally acrimonious, which exposed the raw nerves of society in the midst of great historical events. In doing so, it brings to life the common experiences of living and dying in Tudor and Stuart England.

This book explores the history of a Native American family using a rich collection of sources, including G. W. Grayson's never-before studied forty-four volume diary. At the heart of the narrative is a fact suppressed to this day by some Graysons: one branch of the family is of African descent. Focusing on five generations from 1780 to 1920, this book reveals the terrible compromises that Indians had to make to survive in the shadow of the expanding American republic. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy of the United States, American Indians disowned their kin, enslaved their relatives, and fought each other on the battlefield. In the 18th-century native South, when the Graysons first welcomed Africans into their family, black-Indian relationships were common and bore little social stigma. But as American slave plantations began to spread across Indian lands, race took on ever greater significance. Native American families found that their survival depended on distancing themselves from their black relatives. The black and Indian Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by US troops in 1813 and again in 1836, endured Indian removal and the Trail of Tears, battled each other in the Civil War, and weathered the destruction of the Creek Nation in the 1890s. When they finally became American citizens in 1907, Oklahoma law defined some Graysons as white, some as black. By this time, the two sides of the family, divided by race, barely acknowledged each other.

Caught in the web of global economic fluctuations, Bombay experienced a cataclysmic financial crisis in the 1860s. Before the crash the city’s economy was heavily dependent on the trade in cotton. By 1865, with the end of the American Civil War, the price of cotton plummeted, and with it the fortunes of Bombay’s people. Even people not directly involved in the cotton trade were affected. Thousands declared themselves insolvent and sought the protection of the Bombay High Court. Drawing on almost twenty thousand petitions of insolvents, Asiya Siddiqi explores a crucial phase of transformations in Indian economy and society. Situating her study in the early colonial period of constant negotiations between local, colonial, and global relationships, Siddiqi maps patterns of income, literacy levels, and connections between religion and occupation. She not only analyses the finances of the wealthy and the powerful but also of working people. Among the people who made an appearance in the insolvency petitions were artisans, traders, courtesans and dancing girls, managers, homemakers, domestic servants, and labourers. The documents tell us about types of professions, modes of self-identification, kinds and degrees of literacy, and income levels. The study also illuminates certain features of colonial law. People whose conduct was grounded in customary codes of practice that were relatively flexible and informal had to negotiate the streamlining and codification of practices that the colonial government undertook. From this scrutiny is revealed the workings of the complex and dynamic economic and social relationships among Bombay’s people in the late nineteenth century.

The permanent building societies of England grew from humble beginnings as a multitude of small and localized institutions in the nineteenth century to become the dominant players in the house mortgage market by the interwar period. The movement cultivated an image of being a champion of home ownership for the working classes, but housing historians have questioned whether building societies really lived up to this claim. This book fills a major gap in the historiography of the movement by investigating the class profile of building society members, and how the design of different building societies affected their accessibility, efficiency, and risk-taking practices between 1880 and 1939. These themes are explored through a case study approach, the results of which show that building societies did lend to working-class households before the First and Second World Wars, with some societies showing a greater commitment to working-class home ownership than others. The phenomenal growth of some of these institutions in the interwar period and the ensuing competition which emerged between them brought about profound changes in their firm structure which impaired their ability to reach out to lower-income households as efficiently as before. The findings of this research are relevant to both past and present debates about the optimal design of financial institutions in overcoming social exclusion in credit markets, and the deleterious effects that firm growth, market competition, and managerial self-interest can have on their performance and stability.

This book offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. The Cancer Problem begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding The Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America. It argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease’s incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

Rarely do Indian environmental discourses examine nature through the lens of caste. Whereas nature is considered as universal and inherent, caste is understood as a constructed historical and social entity. Mukul Sharma shows how caste and nature are intimately connected. He compares Dalit meanings of environment to ideas and practices of neo-Brahmanism and certain mainstreams of environmental thought. Showing how Dalit experiences of environment are ridden with metaphors of pollution, impurity, and dirt, the author is able to bring forth new dimensions on both environment and Dalits, without valourizing the latter’s standpoint. Rather than looking for a coherent understanding of their ecology, the book explores the diverse and rich intellectual resources of Dalits, such as movements, songs, myths, memories, and metaphors around nature. These reveal their quest to define themselves in caste-ridden nature and building a form of environmentalism free from the burdens of caste. The Dalits also pose a critical challenge to Indian environmentalism, which has, until now, marginalized such linkages between caste and nature.

This is a book about the medieval obsession with defining and practising superior conduct and the social consequences that followed from it. It is also a book about how historians since the seventeenth century have understood medieval conduct, because in many ways we still see it through the eyes of the writers of the Enlightenment. This is nowhere more so in its defining of superior conduct on the figure of the knight, and categorizing it as Chivalry. Using for the first time the full range of the considerable twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature on conduct in the European vernaculars and in Latin, the book describes and defines what superior lay conduct was in European society before Chivalry, and maps how Chivalry emerged and redefined superior conduct in the last generation of the twelfth century, and suggests how and why it did. The emergence of Chivalry was, however, only one part of a major social change, because it also made necessary a new and narrower definition and understanding of what Nobility was, which had consequences for the medieval understanding of gender, social class, violence, and the limits of law. The book tackles social change on a European scale and in the emerging understanding that twelfth- and thirteenth-century elite society was a predominantly literate one. Indeed, the majority of the many male and female writers on conduct used here (mostly for the first time in a social history book) were not churchmen, but lay people giving their opinion on their own society and its problems.