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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. -
Negative Portrayals of Poles in Elizabethan Literature
Posted on December 8, 2012 | No CommentsAnglo-Polish relations improved during the first half of the sixteenth century. The newly established power of the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania probably raised English hopes that English merchants would gain greater access into the Baltic Sea. High-level diplomatic contacts between the two nations became more frequent. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
“Unspottyd Lambs Of the Lord”: Presbyterianism and the People in Elizabethan London
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsAs a result of this popular appeal, the presbyterian movement was able to endure the systematic attempts to eliminate it carried out by the Queen and the church hierarchy, to continue to help shape the nation's religious climate under the Stuarts, and to leave a lasting mark on English culture. -
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. -
Garden seeds in England before the late eighteenth century: I. Seed growing
Posted on February 19, 2012 | No CommentsPeculiar elements which shaped the development of garden seed production and marketing include the important role of foreigners in the process of innovation, technical difficulties and uncertainties of production balanced by the possibility of high profits, competition from imports, dependence on a retail market subject to fashion, and the emergence of seed growing from another innovation-market gardening. -
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.