God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660-1720 PDF Download

Author: Brodie Waddell
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 184383779X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
An analysis of later Stuart economic culture that contributes significantly to our understanding of early modern society. The English economy underwent profound changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, yet the worldly affairs of ordinary people continued to be shaped as much by traditional ideals and moral codes as by material conditions.This book explores the economic implications of many of the era's key concepts, including Christian stewardship, divine providence, patriarchal power, paternal duty, local community, and collective identity. Brodie Waddell drawson a wide range of contemporary sources - from ballads and pamphlets to pauper petitions and guild regulations - to show that such ideas pervaded every aspect of social and economic relations during this crucial period. Previous discussions of English economic life have tended to ignore or dismiss the influence of cultural factors. By contrast, Waddell argues that popular beliefs about divine will, social duty and communal bonds remained the frame through which most people viewed vital 'earthly' concerns such as food marketing, labour relations, trade policy, poor relief, and many others. This innovative study, demonstrating both the vibrancy and the diversity of the 'moral economies' of the later Stuart period, represents a significant contribution to our understanding of early modern society. It will be essential reading for all early modern British economic and cultural historians. BrodieWaddell is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He has published on preaching, local government, the landscape and other aspects of early modern society.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786613978479
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The English economy underwent profound changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, yet the worldly affairs of ordinary people continued to be shaped as much by traditional ideals and moral codes as by material conditions. This book explores the economic implications of many of the era's key concepts, including Christian stewardship, divine providence, patriarchal power, paternal duty, local community, and collective identity. Brodie Waddell draws on a wide range of contemporary sources - from ballads and pamphlets to pauper petitions and guild regulations - to show that such ideas pervaded every aspect of social and economic relations during this crucial period. Previous discussions of English economic life have tended to ignore or dismiss the influence of cultural factors. By contrast, Waddell argues that popular beliefs about divine will, social duty and communal bonds remained the frame through which most people viewed vital 'earthly' concerns such as food marketing, labour relations, trade policy, poor relief, and many others. This innovative study, demonstrating both the vibrancy and the diversity of the 'moral economies' of the later Stuart period, represents a significant contribution to our understanding of early modern society. It will be essential reading for all early modern British economic and cultural historians. Brodie Waddell is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He has published on preaching, local government, the landscape and other aspects of early modern society.

Author: Keith Wrightson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108210201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
The 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.

Author: Jonah Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009305182
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book traces the beginnings of a shift from one model of gendered power to another. Over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, traditional practices of local government by heads of household began to be undermined by new legal ideas about what it meant to hold office. In London, this enabled the emergence of a new kind of officeholding and a new kind of policing, rooted in a fraternal culture of official masculinity. London officers arrested, searched, and sometimes assaulted people on the basis of gendered suspicions, especially poorer women. Gender and Policing in Early Modern England describes how a recognisable form of gendered policing emerged from practices of local government by patriarchs and addresses wider questions about the relationship between gender and the state.

Author: Alexandra Shepard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1783270179
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Written by leading authorities, the volume can be considered a standard work on seventeenth-century English social history. A tribute to the work of Keith Wrightson, Remaking English Society re-examines the relationship between enduring structures and social change in early modern England. Collectively, the essays in the volume reconstruct the fissures and connections that developed both within and between social groups during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on the experience of rapid economic and demographic growth and on related processesof cultural diversification, the contributors address fundamental questions about the character of English society during a period of decisive change. Prefaced by a substantial introduction which traces the evolution of early modern social history over the last fifty years, these essays (each of them written by a leading authority) not only offer state-of-the-art assessments of the historiography but also represent the latest research on a variety of topics that have been at the heart of the development of 'the new social history' and its cultural turn: gender relations and sexuality; governance and litigation; class and deference; labouring relations, neighbourliness and reciprocity; and social status and consumption. STEVE HINDLE is W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. ALEXANDRA SHEPARD is Reader in History, University of Glasgow. JOHN WALTER is Professor of History, University of Essex. Contributors: Helen Berry, Adam Fox, H. R. French, Malcolm Gaskill, Paul Griffiths, Steve Hindle, Craig Muldrew, Lindsay O'Neill, Alexandra Shepard, Tim Stretton, Naomi Tadmor, John Walter, Phil Withington, Andy Wood

Author: David Pennington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317126157
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Going to Market rethinks women’s contributions to the early modern commercial economy. A number of previous studies have focused on whether or not the early modern period closed occupational opportunities for women. By attending to women’s everyday business practices, and not merely to their position on the occupational ladder, this book shows that they could take advantage of new commercial opportunities and exercise a surprising degree of economic agency. This has implications for early modern gender relations and commercial culture alike. For the evidence analyzed here suggests that male householders and town authorities alike accepted the necessity of women’s participation in the commercial economy, and that women’s assertiveness in marketplace dealings suggests how little influence patriarchal prescriptions had over the way in which men and women did business. The book also illuminates England’s departure from what we often think of as a traditional economic culture. Because women were usually in charge of provisioning the household, scholars have seen them as the most ardent supporters of an early-modern ’moral economy’, which placed the interests of poor consumers over the efficiency of markets. But the hard-headed, hard-nosed tactics of market women that emerge in this book suggests that a profit-oriented commercial culture, far from being the preserve of wealthy merchants and landowners, permeated early modern communities. Through an investigation of a broad range of primary sources-including popular literature, criminal records, and civil litigation depositions-the study reconstructs how women did business and negotiated with male householders, authorities, customers, and competitors. This analysis of the records shows women able to leverage their commercial roles and social contacts to defend the economic interests of their households and their neighborhoods.

Author: Tawny Paul
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108496946
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Examines debt insecurity in eighteenth-century Britain, a period of famously rapid economic growth when many people nevertheless experienced financial failure.

Author: Timothy Alborn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000586006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This volume uses the extreme case of misers to examine interlocking categories that undergirded the emergence of modern British society, including new perspectives on charity, morality, and marriage; new representations of passion and sympathy; and new modes of saving, spending, and investment. Misers surveys this class of people—as invented and interpreted in sermons, poems, novels, and plays; analyzed by economists and philosophers; and profiled in obituaries and biographies—to explore how British attitudes about saving money shifted between 1700 and 1860. As opposed to the century before, the nineteenth century witnessed a new appreciation for misers, as economists credited them with adding to the nation's stock of capital and novelists newly imagined their capacity to empathize with fellow human beings. These characters shared the spotlight with real people who posthumously donned that label, populating into a cottage industry of miser biographies by the 1850s. By the time A Christmas Carol appeared in 1843, many Victorians had come to embrace misers as links that connected one generation’s extreme saving with the next generation’s virtuous spending. With a broad chronological period, this volume is useful for students and scholars interested in representation of misers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Author: Karin Bowie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000293505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
This book assesses the everyday use of petitions in administrative and judicial settings and contrasts these with more assertive forms of political petitioning addressed to assemblies or rulers. A petition used to be a humble means of asking a favour, but in the early modern period, petitioning became more assertive and participative. This book shows how this contrasted to ordinary petitioning, often to the consternation of authorities. By evaluating petitioning practices in Scotland, England and Denmark, the book traces the boundaries between ordinary and adversarial petitioning and shows how non-elites could become involved in politics through petitioning. Also observed are the responses of authorities to participative petitions, including the suppression or forgetting of unwelcome petitions and consequent struggles to establish petitioning as a right rather than a privilege. Together the chapters in this book indicate the significance of collective petitioning in articulating early modern public opinion and shaping contemporary ideas about opinion at large. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Parliaments, Estates & Representation.

Author: Alexandra Shepard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192552422
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Accounting for Oneself is a major new study of the social order in early modern England, as viewed and articulated from the bottom up. Engaging with how people from across the social spectrum placed themselves within the social order, it pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts when answering questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, and with a broad geographical coverage, this study explores how men and women accounted for their 'worth' and described what they did for a living at differing points in the life-cycle. A corrective to top-down, male-centric accounts of the social order penned by elite observers, the perspective from below testifies to an intricate hierarchy based on sophisticated forms of social reckoning that were articulated throughout the social scale. A culture of appraisal was central to the competitive processes whereby people judged their own and others' social positions. For the majority it was not land that was the yardstick of status but moveable property-the goods and chattels in people's possession ranging from livestock to linens, tools to trading goods, tables to tubs, clothes to cushions. Such items were repositories of wealth and the security for the credit on which the bulk of early modern exchange depended. Accounting for Oneself also sheds new light on women's relationship to property, on gendered divisions of labour, and on early modern understandings of work which were linked as much to having as to getting a living. The view from below was not unchanging, but bears witness to the profound impact of widening social inequality that opened up a chasm between the middle ranks and the labouring poor between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. As a result, not only was the social hierarchy distorted beyond recognition, from the later-seventeenth century there was also a gradual yet fundamental reworking of the criteria informing the calculus of esteem.