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Guns, Gales & God: Elizabeth I’s ‘Merchant Navy’
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsIan Friel argues that popular ideas of the nature of Elizabethan seapower are distorted by concentration on big names and major events. Elizabethan England’s emergence on to the world stage owed much more to merchant ships and common seamen than we might think. -
‘Selling Consumption’: An Examination of Eighteenth-Century English Trade Cards
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsAdditionally, the cards’ aesthetic enticed consumers by using themes, images and a language that would have been associated with innovation, originality and luxury. -
Managing Change in The English Reformation: The 1548 Dissolution of the Chantries and Clergy of the Midland County Surveys
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsDid the English Reformation happen because Thomas Cromwell, seeing political possibilities in the new religious ideas now abroad, applied these to resolving Henry VIII‟s marital difficulties? After all, Henry VIII wanted a son and, despairing of his now middle-aged wife, Katherine, had found a likely fruitful replacement in Anne Boleyn. -
Gold is the strength, the sinnewes of the world’: Continental Gold and Tudor England
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsThis survey will examine finds of foreign gold coins from Tudor England to ascertain their prevalence, use and impact upon the English currency. -
CAP MAKERS IN MID NINETEENTH CENTURY WHITECHAPEL
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn the 1851 census, Whitechapel was the London registration district with the largest number of cap makers recorded. Whitechapel registration district included a number of parishes or townships in addition to Whitechapel itself, such as Spitalfields. -
Did Slavery make Scotia great?
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsIn the last few years, however, the research agenda has changed dramatically. Studies have now started to be published on the Scottish connection with the West India sugar colonies and the extent of Scottish involvement in slave trading itself or, by proxy, in Bristol, Liverpool and London. A new interest has also developed in the impact of the slave-based economies on Scotland which connects with older work on the relationship between the imperial trades and Scottish economic development -
Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company, c. 1779–c. 1821
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsFor the first century of the Company’s operations, which remained at Hudson’s Bay, the personnel needs of the HBC were small. A recruitment ethos was established in which the directors prioritised the employment of English ‘country lads’ and Scots, largely due to their perceived qualities of subordination, sobriety, obedience and ability to endure deprivation. -
The 1738–41 Harvest Crisis in Scotland
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsTo demonstrate this, the harvest and mortality crisis or macroeconomic depression of 1738–41, a hitherto largely unexplored event in Scotland’s eighteenth-century economic history, has been chosen. -
The Culture of Crime: Representations of the Criminal in Eighteenth-Century England
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsAs the title of this study should suggest, this dissertation aims to account for this increasing representation of criminality in England throughout the eighteenth century. And as the title of this opening chapter indicates, this introduction aims to account for the methods and biases that inform this study and are utilized throughout. -
“Putting to Hazard a Certainty”: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England
Posted on September 1, 2012 | No CommentsI hope to enrich our understanding of the early decades of the Financial Revolution by examining a financial instrument that has received much less attention, at least from literary scholars with interests in financial and economic history: the lottery. I focus on the lottery to show the deep foundations of the Financial Revolution in gambling. -
Reading Silk: England’s Search for a National Identity, 1590-1630
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsIn this thesis, I plan to demonstrate that silk becomes a tool for nation building. While at first the English peoples’ insatiable appetite for silk creates an identity crisis of sorts for England, with the conflicting desires to emulate foreign practices and also to remain steadfast to the nation, silk is eventually recognized as a material that has the power to unite the English people. -
‘So manie gallant gentlemen’: Imperial humanists and Tudor imperial identity
Posted on August 27, 2012 | No CommentsIn Tudor England, the salient features of civic humanism became support of the status quo according to a "princely" model, an emphasis on the vita activa as necessary for a life of manly virtue, and a commitment to programs of social and economic reform instituted by the state. -
Functional Goods and Fancies: The Production and Consumption of Consumer Goods in Northumberland, Newcastle upon Tyne and Durham c. 1680-1780
Posted on August 22, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis explores the place of consumer goods in the culturally changing environment of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. It specifically focuses on the production and consumption of consumer goods in Northumberland, Newcastle and Durham between c. 1680 to 1780. -
The justice of the peace and county government in the East Riding of Yorkshire, 1782-1836
Posted on August 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe Riding was dominated by its geology and geography. It was predominantly agricultural with few major settlements and very little industrial development. -
The English fishing industry, 1790-1914: a case study of the Yorkshire coast
Posted on August 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe work also charts the associated development of the Yorkshire coast herring fishery. It furthermore, seeks to explain the causes of decline which afflicted all sectors of the local industry from the 1880s onwards.In all areas of this thesis, the research work undertaken has utilised a wide variety of primary sources including records of both local and national organisations. -
Dealer in Magic: James Cox’s Jewelry Museum and the Economics of Luxurious Spectacle in Late-Eighteenth-Century London
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsI suggest that the museum Cox established in the 1770s illuminates an eighteenth- century arts industry located in London, the nature of which needs to be better understood if we are adequately to understand the concept of an alliance between heritage and commerce for the benefit of the nation in which much current economic and cultural discourse is grounded. -
“Exchanging Values”: Negotiating Pedagogical Authority and the Transmission of Knowledge in Sixteenth-Century English Pedagogical Literature
Posted on July 20, 2012 | No CommentsWhere anxieties are experienced today regarding the commercialization of education, they are generally read as the product of modern capitalist society. -
Bonnets, Muffs and Trinkets, Oh My! Conspicuous Consumption of Prostitutes in London
Posted on July 20, 2012 | No CommentsImitation and emulation in fashion gained considerable notice from commentators in England during the eighteenth century. A quote from The British Magazine in 1763 illustrates this well. “The present rage of imitating the manners of high life hath spread itself so far among the gentle folks of lower life, that in a few years we shall probably have no common folk at all. -
England and the Machinery of Reason 1780 to 1830
Posted on July 18, 2012 | No CommentsThe increasingly sturdy optimism that nature could be understood and controlled both influenced and was equally strengthened by, the growing development of manufactures and attempts to understand labour productivity during this period. -
Adultery in Early Stuart England
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsBut spectacles of sexual transgression could not only be seen in theatres. Rhymes and broadside ballads sung at street corners or markets, or hung up on walls of taverns and private houses told of lusty bachelors and maidens, of unfaithful, slothful, or violent husbands and wives. -
Patriotic women: Shakespearean heroines of the 1720s
Posted on May 19, 2012 | No CommentsEarly 18th-century adaptations of Shakespeare can arguably be regarded as reconstructions of the plays for the ‘modern’ stage. Commentators such as Jean Marsden have convincingly suggested that post-1660 drama turns its attention to love, family and marriage, all subjects befitting the presence of women... -
‘The inordinate excess in apparel’: Sumptuary Legislation in Tudor England
Posted on April 29, 2012 | No CommentsSumptuary legislation can be defined as a set of regulations, passed down by legislators through statutory law and parliamentary proclamations, that sought to regulate society by dictating what contemporaries could own or wear based on their position within society. -
Commercial conflict and regulation in the discourse of trade in seventeenth-century England
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough the term is no longer as popular as once was the case, mercantilism continues to dominate our understanding of the commercial ideas and legislation of seventeenth-century England, referring not so much to a distinctive school of economic thought or ideology, as a vague set of assumptions about the belligerent nature of commerce and the inevitable need for state regulation of it. -
The Wife’s Administration of the Earnings’? Working-Class Women and Savings in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a range of proposals for ways to improve the condition of the poor by stimulating savings. Institutions that encouraged and rewarded thrift would, it was argued, reduce dependence in old age on the Poor Law: the industrious would be rewarded for their good habits and the idle and vicious would suffer if required to rely on their own exertions rather than on public assistance. -
The City of York in the time of Henry VIII
Posted on January 31, 2012 | No CommentsDuring this period, the role of the landed aristocracy was changing. With the creation of a professional standing army, in which soldiers were paid a wage, and the use of foreign mercenaries (think of the Swiss Guard), the traditional military function of the nobility receded. -
The boot and shoe trades in London and Paris in the long eighteenth century
Posted on December 13, 2011 | No CommentsVery different appears to be the Parisian case, where provincial producers flourished only after the mechanisation of the sector. By the 1850s mechanisation meant the beginning of a new phase in the trade. -
`The counterfeit silly curr`: money, politics and the forging of royalist newspapers in the English civil war
Posted on December 13, 2011 | No CommentsConsidering visual,textual,and contextual evidence, as well as literary style and substantive content,I develop in this article methods for distinguishing rivals of Pragmaticus. -
Secretaries, statesmen and spies: the clerks of the Tudor Privy Council, c. 1540-c. 1603
Posted on November 18, 2011 | No CommentsThe office of clerk of the Privy Council has been largely ignored by historians.While some individual clerks who eventually rose to the ranks of the Privy Council have drawn some attention from scholars, most clerks are unknown, or mentioned only tangentially in journal articles or historical monographs. -
Political Bodies and Animal Economies: Reconsidering the Relationship between Healthcare and Statecraft in Late Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on October 7, 2011 | No CommentsPolitical Bodies and Animal Economies: Reconsidering theRelationship between Healthcare and Statecraft in Late Seventeenth-Century England Ridge, Steve (Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London) Ex... -
The Madonna and the Whore: The Victorian Wife and the Victorian Prostitute, a Collision of Virtue and Vice
Posted on October 4, 2011 | No CommentsThe Madonna and the Whore: The Victorian Wife and the Victorian Prostitute, a Collision of Virtue and Vice Coressel, Patti Lourdes College Online Narrative History Journal, Volume 9 (2011) Abstract...