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Economic History Archive
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Changing Fortunes during the Fifteenth Century Recession
Posted on March 24, 2013 | No CommentsHow far did the fifteenth-century recession change the relationship between landlords and tenants in Durham? There can be little doubt that this was a period of hardship for landowners. -
Becoming a London Goldsmith in the Seventeenth Century: Social Capital and Mobility of Apprentices and Masters of the Guild
Posted on January 26, 2013 | No CommentsThe goldsmiths experienced a great change in the second half of the seventeenth century with the development of banking. -
Alchemy and Economy in Seventeenth Century England
Posted on January 22, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay examines two seventeenth-century approaches to gold, alchemy and economics, both of which esteemed gold as ‘valuable’ and pursued it practically. -
More Than Just Kidd’s Play
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsTom Wareham examines the role played by a legendary yet ill-fated pirate in the consolidation of England’s early trading empire. -
The globalisation of codfish and wool: Spanish-English-North American triangular trade in the early modern period
Posted on January 13, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper analyses the transformation of two of the staple trades of the pre-modern international economy – those in wool and dried codfish – during the transition from the late medieval to the early-modern economy. -
Promoting the Pint: Ale and Advertising in late Victorian and Edwardian England
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsNineteenth-century brewers displayed more creativity when it came to advertising their wares than they have been given credit for by the trade’s historians. -
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Ermine: Elizabeth I’s Coronation Robes and Mothers’ Legacies in Early Modern England
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe first part of this essay explores how many links between mothers and children were therefore conceived through—even created by—mate- rial goods. -
‘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. -
Did the Glorious Revolution Contribute to the Transport Revolution?
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsMost studies on political change and economic development in Britain focus on government or private borrowing, taxation, and the stock market. Infrastructure investment has received little discussion by comparison. -
Malthus in the Bedroom: Birth Spacing as a Preventive Check Mechanism in Pre-Modern England
Posted on November 29, 2012 | No CommentsWe question the received wisdom that birth limitation was absent among historical populations and that it did not emerge before the fertility transition of the late nineteenth century. -
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. -
Witchcraft and Family: What Can Witchcraft Documents Tell Us About Early Modern Scottish Family Life?
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsA wide range of document-types survive for the early modern period. But random survival rates of potentially detailed docu- ments coupled with their often significant lack of detail about women and the lower orders means that at this stage we do not know even the very basics about family life, let alone people’s subjective thoughts and experiences of family. -
Victorian Values
Posted on October 6, 2012 | No Comments‘ “Victorian” is an academic epithet with which I feel profoundly uneasy for a number of reasons’, Kate Flint remarked in 2005, arguing that it has led to an unwholesome ‘period fetishism’, together with a limited view of transnational cultures, and an unreflective inclination to pack too many disparate intellectual and social movements into one simple grouping. -
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 -
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 Myths of the South Sea Bubble
Posted on September 23, 2012 | No CommentsThe South Sea Bubble of 1720 looms large in popular depictions of eighteenth-century Britain. -
Eat, drink, man, woman: Food, eating, and social formations in Renaissance culture and drama
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation explores the ways in which representations of food and eating in the drama and culture of Early Modern England contribute to its social formation. -
“A Right Sort of Man”: Gender, Class Identity, and Social Reform in Late-Victorian Britain
Posted on September 3, 2012 | No CommentsBecause of a lack of consensus among policymakers on the education issue, school fees were not eliminated until 1891, and compulsory attendance did not become national policy until 1880. -
The Occupational and Organizational Structures of the Northamptonshire Worsted and Shoemaking Trades, circa 1750-1821
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsNorthamptonshire, along with other agricultural counties in southern England, went into industrial decline sometime in the second half of the eighteenth century. -
“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. -
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 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. -
The Development of Modern Propaganda in Britain, 1854-1902
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsThe aim of this thesis then is to address this gap by considering the nature, meaning and operation of propaganda in this period. In order to accomplish this, this thesis creates a set of criteria for identifying and distinguishing „modern‟ propaganda, before demonstrating that what is generally conceived as modern, and characteristic of the twentieth century, in fact existed or was developing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. -
The political economy of Anglo-American naval relations: pirates, slavers and the equatorial Atlantic, 1819 to 1863
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsAnglo-American naval relations in the equatorial Atlantic reveal that the nations were neither friends, nor enemies, but sought to contain their disputes so they could further their individual policy objectives that would be harmed by a war. -
The early modern demographic dynamic : celibates and celibacy in seventeenth-century England
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsBut by failing to investigate shifts in the nature and extent of celibacy from a more holistic perspective, historians have also failed to appreciate the overall impact of a rise in the proportion of lifelong celibates on the economy, society and culture of Tudor and Stuart England. -
“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. -
Female Body as Geosomatic Apotrope in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Middleton
Posted on July 19, 2012 | No CommentsAs a geographic trope transposed to literary discourse, discovery remains closely linked to the desire for possession. Postcolonial criticism has sought to deconstruct the feminized and sexualized discourses of geographic places and spaces as objects of desire, invasion, and annexation. -
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. -
The English Civil War in the American Colonies
Posted on July 15, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough Privateers claiming to support the King operated out of Wexford and Waterford in Ireland as well as Dunkirk, it was not until the Royalists took Bristol, Exeter and Dartmouth in 1643 that they had major anchorages in mainland Britain from which to import arms, conduct trade and launch maritime operations. -
The Origins of Bicycle Racing in England: Technology, Entertainment, Sponsorship and Advertising in the Early History of the Sport
Posted on July 11, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper therefore examines the origins and early evolution of the sport of bicycle racing in Britain. How much evidence is there of the earliest bicycle competitions and races? What kinds of events were they? What was the economic and social stimulus behind them? -
‘Witchcraft is a rife and common sinne in these our daies’: The Powers of Witches in English Demonologies, 1580-1620
Posted on June 25, 2012 | No CommentsI contend that a detailed textual analysis of these works displays the complexity of early modern witchcraft beliefs, as significant divergences among these authors‟ arguments demonstrate that it is impossible to identify a single, “typical” English demonology, or to conclude that “elite” ideas about early modern witchcraft were homogeneous and hegemonic. -
Masters and servants: the Hudson’s Bay Company and its personnel, 1668-1782
Posted on May 17, 2012 | No CommentsThe HBC drew its labour force from the competitive labour ‘market’ of early modern Britain: the movement of men to and from the Bay was an aspect of domestic labour mobility. -
‘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. -
The Seymour Family: Edward, Jane, and Thomas, c. 1500-1552
Posted on April 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe Seymour family was a very old and well established, if not distinguished, family. Their lineage can be traced to an obscure knight who came to England v/ith 1/iliiam the Conqueror. The Seymour name came to the family in the first half of the fourteenth century when Sir Roger de St.Maur married Cicely,the eldest sister and heir of John de Beauchamp. -
Local Government and Society in Early Modern England: Hertfordshire and Essex, C. 1590-1630
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsIn this dissertation, I propose to study the administrative and social history of two adjoining English counties, Essex and Hertfordshire, for the period of 1590 through 1630. As a political and social history, this study will track the careers and social relationships of the justices of the peace, as well as other county officials, such as the sheriff, the deputy lieutenants, and the lord lieutenant (usually the resident nobleman of a county). -
From obligation to agreement: concepts of servitude in early modern England
Posted on April 10, 2012 | No CommentsUntil quite recently, servants played a central role in European family life...Early Modern England was no exception, for nearly every household participated in the institution of servitude. -
Victorian Governesses: A Look at Education and Professionalization
Posted on April 4, 2012 | No CommentsVictorian governesses found themselves central to the debate of ideal womanhood because of their roles as educators and workers. Governesses and others concerned with the conditions of governesses endeavored to professionalize that career by embracing and taking part in the movement for higher female education and the advancement of women in other fields of work. -
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. -
Binding Prometheus: How the 19th Century Expansion of Trade Impeded Britain’s Ability to Raise an Army
Posted on March 6, 2012 | No CommentsContrary to the conventional wisdom that trade enhances a state’s military power, we find that the expansion of trade did not ease Britain’s resource constraints by making labor more freely available for military purposes. -
Shipbuilding and the English International Timber Trade, 1300-1700: a framework for study using Niche Construction Theory
Posted on March 1, 2012 | No CommentsEnglish trade has long been dependent upon the sea as the main thoroughfare for goods traveling to and from the island. Boats and ships of various sizes, shapes, and varieties have in tum, until the last century with airplanes and the Channel Tunnel, been the primary means of leaving England for any purpose. -
‘Contrary to the liberties of this city’: Henry VII, English towns and the economics of law and order
Posted on February 9, 2012 | No CommentsFurthermore, the second half of the fifteenth century witnessed the increasing popularity of equity law as a desirable alternative to both common law courts and local jurisdictions. This situation was not lost on the mayors, burgesses and aldermen of English towns, nor on Henry VII. -
English hunger and industrial disorders : a study of social conflict during the first decade of George III’s reign
Posted on January 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation will argue that while the distress of the industrious poor, which followed sudden fluctuations in food prices and declining employment was the common denominator in the numerous riots of the 1760's, the disorders were merely the surface manifestation of underlying political, economic, social and intellectual ferment which affected all levels of society. -
Britain’s legacy of slavery
Posted on December 29, 2011 | No CommentsProfessor Catherine Hall and her team in the project Legacies of British Slave-ownership are examining how modern Britain, from its art collections and grand buildings to its financial institutions, has been built on the wealth generated from slavery. -
`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. -
The contexts and contours of British economic literature, 1660-1760
Posted on December 12, 2011 | No CommentsIn the century after the Restoration of Charles II there was a remarkable outpouring of thinking about economic issues in Britain, of exploring the ways and means to prosperity and plenty. -
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... -
The East India Company, 1749-1800: The Evolution of a Territorial Strategy and the Changing Role of the Directors
Posted on March 20, 2010 | No CommentsThe East India Company, 1749-1800: The Evolution of a Territorial Strategy and the Changing Role of the Directors By P. Bruce Buchan Business and Economic History, Vol. 23, no. 1... -
Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England
Posted on March 5, 2010 | No CommentsLabours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England By Carolyn Steedman Cambridge University Press, 2009 ISBN: 9780521516372 This is a unique account of the hidden history of servants...