It is time to reexamine craft and small-scale manufacture within our histories of industrialisation, both West and East, and to reflect on the long survival and adaptation of artisanal production even within our globalised world of production and consumption. Historians since the 1950s have addressed craft, skill and labour-intensive production in historical frameworks such as ‘the rise of the factory system’, ‘proto-industrialisation’ and ‘flexible specialisation’. More recently, they have devised other concepts which include labour and skill-intensive production such as ‘industrious revolution’, ‘the great divergence’, ‘knowledge economies’, ‘East Asian development paths’ and ‘cycles of production’. This paper surveys this historiography of craft and skill in models of industrialisation. It then reflects on small-scale industrial structures in current globalisation, emphasising the continued significance of craft and skill over a long history of global transitions. It gives close examination to one region, Gujarat, and its recent industrial and global history. The paper compares industrial production for East India Company trade in the eighteenth century to the recent engagement of the artisans of the Kachchh district of Gujarat in global markets. It draws on the oral histories of seventy-five artisan families to discuss the past and future of craft and skill in the industry of the global economy.

WHEN the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (D) s.a. 1066 described the submission ‘out of necessity’ of many of the most important members of the English nobility to duke William at Berkhamstead, which followed extensive ravaging by the invading army, the chronicler lamented the fact that it was only at this stage that the English did so ‘… after most of the damage had been done—and it was a great piece of folly that they had not done it earlier, since God would not make things better, because of our sins…’, implying that the spoliation of the countryside would have ended with a submission and acceptance of the new ruler inflicted as a punishment by God. He continued, ‘And they gave hostages and swore oaths to him, and he promised them that he would be a gracious liege lord to them, and yet in the meantime they ravaged all that they overran.’ The chronicler is clearly shocked by this behaviour on the part of William and his forces, which only seems to end, in his account, with the coronation. Well he might be, for when dates of coronation for English kings in the previous two centuries can be firmly established, they usually occur some considerable time after a constitutive royal accession. Thus, for instance, Edward the Elder, Æthelstan, Æthelred, and Edward the Confessor6 were all crowned in the following years.

THE term ‘heptarchy’, coined by John Selden in the seventeenth century to describe the political sub–divisions of England at the time of the conversion, has been handed down by successive generations of historians and still colours our thinking today. Fascinating though the word may be to the historiographer, from a strictly historical point of view it is high time it was given a decent burial, for its inadequacy has been apparent ever since Sir Henry Spelman, Selden's illustrious contemporary, edited the document known as the Tribal Hidage.

THE Scandinavians came to Britain first as raiders, then as settlers. The length of the periods of raiding, the form of raids, the character and duration of settlement and the speed with which Scandinavian influence was lost, varied considerably in the different regions. In simple terms the Viking Age lasted from 790 to 1070, but within and beyond these dates is infinite variety. In England the first settlements are not recorded before 876, eighty years or more after the first raids; in Scotland, however, there is fairly firm evidence of settlement in the first half of the ninth century, while in some parts of Scotland settlement may not even have been preceded by raids. It is clear too that Guthrum's conquests are of an entirely different character to those of Knut the Great. Guthrum was a petty chief. Knut a great ruler, was accepted as such by his royal contemporaries and his power achieved imperial proportions. In Ireland, where they settled in very limited areas, the Scandinavians lost most of their political power in the late tenth century. Their commercial importance there, however, grew by leaps and bounds, but even in this role they lost all semblance of influence after the Norman conquest of Ireland of 1169. Norse power was broken in western Scotland after the battle of Largs in 1263 (although Norse earls held sway in the Isles until 1331). The Isle of Man was transferred to the Scottish crown in 1266, while Orkney and Shetland remained Norwegian until the impignorations of 1468 and 1469.

Feminist thought and activism was a feature of Irish political life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because the women's suffrage campaign coincided with and was at times influenced by wider debates on the national question, it has often been understood almost entirely in relation to Irish nationalism and unionism, and usually in the specific context of acute political crisis such as the third Home Rule. The Irish suffrage movement should instead be understood both in terms of wider political developments and in particular Irish contexts. This paper surveys aspects of feminist political culture with a particular emphasis on the way that nationalist Irish women articulated and negotiated their involvement in the women's suffrage movement. It argues that the relationship between the two was both more nuanced and dynamic than has been allowed, and that opposition to women's activism should be understood in structural and cultural terms as well as in broadly political ones. The relationship should also be understood in longer historical terms than is usual as it also evolved in the context of broader political and social shifts and campaigns, some of which predated the third Home Rule crisis.

On 25 May 1785, a M. Lousteau arrived at the police station in Port Louis, Isle de France (now Mauritius) to complain that his slave Jouan had been abducted. He described Jouan as an ‘Indien’, ‘Lascar’ and ‘Malabar’, and said that he had learned that he had been smuggled on to the royal ship Le Brillant, bound for Pondicherry in southern India, by one Bernard (whom Lousteau describes as a ‘creol libre’ but who later is described as ‘Malabar, soi-disant libre’ and ‘Topa Libre’). The story of the escape had been told to him by a ‘Bengalie’ slave called Modeste, who belonged to the ‘Lascar’ fisherman, Bacou. A number of people had apparently assisted Jouan's escape in other ways—most importantly his trunk of belongings had been moved secretly from hut to hut before being embarked with him. Lousteau was a member of that ever-growing professional group of eighteenth-century France and its colonies: the lawyers. He was clerk to the island's supreme court, the Conseil Superieur. He supported a large family, he said, and the loss of Jouan represented a serious loss to their welfare. Jouan, it turned out, was no ordinary slave. He was a skilled carpenter who earned his master a significant sum every month; he was highly valued, and Lousteau had refused an offer of 5,000 livres for him. What is more, he could be easily recognised, for he was always exceptionally well turned-out and well-groomed. To facilitate in the search for his slave, Lousteau provided the following description of him:

He declares that his fugitive slave is of the Lascar caste, a Malabar, dark black in colour, short in height, with a handsome, slightly thin face, a gentle appearance, with long hair … that he is very well dressed, abundantly endowed with clothes, such as jackets and shorts … wearing small gold earrings, a pin with a gold heart on his shirt, and on the arm a mark on the skin which he thinks reads DM.

The position of the Church of England in colonial New England has usually been seen through the lens of the ‘bishop controversy’ of the 1760s and early 1770s, where Congregational fears of the introduction of a Laudian style bishop to British North America have been viewed as one of the key factors leading to the American Revolution. By contrast, this paper explores some of the successes enjoyed by the Church of England in New England, particularly in the period from the 1730s to the early 1760s, and examines some of the reasons for the Church's growth in these years. It argues that in some respects the Church in New England was in fact becoming rather more popular, more indigenous and more integrated into New England life than both eighteenth-century Congregationalists or modern historians have wanted to believe, and that the Church was making headway both in the Puritan heartlands, and in the newer centres of population growth. Up until the early 1760s, the progress of the Church of England in New England was beginning to look like a success story rather than one with in-built failure.

My lecture will start with a kind of prelude. I am going to show you a work of art which, though unconnected with Gregory VII and the movement of church reform that bears his name, will help to set the stage for our discussion proper. The scene of my prelude will not be eleventh-century Italy at all, but rather the court of the Norman kings of Sicily in the twelfth century. I hope you will not lose patience during what may seem a rather irritating detour and agree with me in the end that this is a case of the longest way round being the shortest way home.

The desire for booty was a motive in all medieval warfare. The preoccupation of the soldier with spoils, with prisoners, horses, equipment and movable wealth in general, is, however, less evident in the surviving sources of early medieval history than in the records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Even a cursory knowledge of the period of Anglo-French hostilities between 1337 and 1453 leaves one under no illusions as to the overriding importance to the combatants of the winnings of war. Spoils mattered equally to the rank and file soldier, to the magnate and to the crown. The depredations of the chevauchee in Languedoc in 1355 benefited everyone in the Black Prince's army. ‘Chevaliers, escuiers, brigants, garchons’ were loaded with ‘leurs prisonniers et leurs richesses’.1 Froissart makes Gloucester in 1390 object to a peace with France because of the ensuing discouragement of the ‘poor knights and squires and archers of England whose comforts and station in society depend upon war’.2 And he tells us also how the Sire d'Albret looked back over his military career and regretted the peace which alliance with France had given him. ‘I'm well enough,’ he told an enquirer, ‘but I had more money, and so did my retinue, when I fought for the king of England.’ An army on the move, he explained, often gave the chance of capturing a rich merchant; hardly a day passed without its prize; thus one could afford the ‘superfluitez et jolitez.…Maintenant nous est mort.’

Cultural factors have often been invoked to explain parliament's decision in 1807 to outlaw slave carrying by British subjects but they have only infrequently been cited in efforts to explain why the Atlantic slave trade itself became so large in the three centuries preceding 1807. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance by looking at ways in which inter-cultural dialogue between Africans and Europeans and related adjustments in social values and adaptations of African institutional arrangements may contribute to improving our understanding of the huge growth in market transactions in enslaved people in Atlantic Africa before 1807. In exploring such issues, the paper draws on important theoretical insights from new institutional economics, notably the work of Douglass North. It also attempts to show how institutionally and culturally based developments in transatlantic slave trafficking, the largest arena of cross-cultural exchange in the Atlantic world before 1850, may themselves help to promote understanding of the much broader historical processes that underpin economic change and the creation of the modern world.

Recent discussions about Mediterranean trade in the early Middle Ages have tended to be based on two main assumptions. First, trade has been regarded as trade between ports in the eastern and western parts of the Mediterranean. Secondly, as a result of this view, the attention of historians has concentrated on the advance of the Arab fleets in the seventh and eighth centuries, which disrupted regular commerce and temporarily diminished the importance of the trading cities of Italy and Provence.

Italy is reputedly the most regional of European nations, yet it is a regionalism of an unusual kind. In most countries, the regions are territories, often with well-marked natural boundaries, containing a variable number of major towns and cities. Behind them there is usually a long history of social and political identity, often leading back to a feudal kingdom or principality; quite often the region is thought of as the home of a particular tribe or people, and regional culture has deep roots in folklore and popular tradition. Typical regions of this kind are Aragon and Catalonia, Anjou and Brittany, Saxony and Bavaria; in Italy only the islands and the South, and the frontier area of Friuli conform to this pattern. Elsewhere, the modern regions or provinces have little historic reality behind them; the social unit was much smaller, and the strongest focus of loyalty was the union of the city and its territory on which both the classical civitas and the medieval commune were founded. Strongly ‘human’ rather than natural in character, the Italian city-regions were upheld by the in-tense particularism of the dominant classes rather than the populace. The more or less autonomous city-state was the natural political expression of this feeling, which nevertheless survived the establishment of the renaissance territorial state with little modification. The multi-centred regional culture for which Italy is famous depended on the sense of separate identity found in the dominant classes of the city region, whether it was politically independent or not; it was a matter of learned men and wealthy patrons rather than popular traditions.

Eighteen years ago F. W. Maitland edited for the Selden Society the first volume of the Year Books of Edward II. In his introduction to that volume, moved by a pardonable enthusiasm, he wrote-perhaps not altogether advisedly— “It will some day seem a wonderful thing that men once thought that they could write the history of mediaeval England without using the Year Books.”. Since then that sentence has been frequently repeated, although it is to be feared that for the most part historians have turned a deaf ear to its warning: and lately Mr. W. C. Bolland, who has himself edited several volumes of Year Books for the same Society, has reiterated Maitland's plea and, going further, has drawn a damaging comparison between the Year Books and the Plea Rolls. The Year Books, we are told, “are the living body, acting and speaking and thinking and wrangling and changing its mind on the pressure of the moment”: while the Plea Rolls present “the skeleton, the dry bones of the bare facts.” It is true that Mr. Bolland is careful to explain that the Year Book and the Roll each contain matter which is absent from the other, and that for historical purposes neither is complete without the other: but there is no doubt that the general impression left by Mr. Bolland's lectures is that the Year Books are of high historical value, that they contain, in his own words, “innumerable matters of interest, legal, historical, constitutional and social, about which the record is entirely silent.”

Monastic reform is generally understood as a textually driven process governed by a renewed interest in early monastic ideals and practices in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and focusing on the discourses of reformers about the Egyptian ‘desert fathers’ as the originators of monasticism. Historians have suggested that tropes about the desert, solitude, etc., drawn from early texts found their way into mainstream accounts of monastic change in the period c. 1080–1150. This paper challenges this model by proposing that considerations of ‘reform’ must take into account parallel movements in Greek Orthodox monasticism and interactions of practice between the two monastic environments. Three case-studies of non-textually derived parallel practices are discussed, and the importance of the Holy Land as a source of inspiration for such practices is advanced in place of Egypt.

During the past thirty years most historians have acknowledged that it is anachronistic to describe Louis XIV as an absolute monarch. Many of them have turned their attention towards the various elite groups whose power and privileges coexisted with those of the crown in the very different, and sometimes fiercely separatist, provinces which formed the kingdom of France. A few have attributed such great influence to local nobles and institutions that the royal government seems to have been reduced to impotence. This impression, clearly too extreme, has been created first by a preoccupation with those issues and periods where the crown was in conflict with many, or in the case of the Frondes with almost all, of its leading subjects, and a disregard for the more numerous occasions when the king and at least some élite groups had identical or compatible purposes. Secondly, it has arisen from a neglect of the informal channels of communication which were often more important than the formal administrative structure for linking the court and the provinces, and for conducting the everyday routine of government. The most important of these was the network of ‘brokers’, often influential governors and bishops, by which provincial requests for highly prized royal patronage—whether titles, orders, offices, privileges or pensions— were conveyed to the ministers and to the king himself. The possibility of personal advancement was a vital consideration for members of the upper social échelons as they calculated their responses to ministerial instructions and enquiries.

In 1657 two small bodies of British troops stood opposed to each other in Flanders. One consisted of English, Irish, and Scottish royalists following the fortunes of Charles II., and serving with the Spanish army. The other was composed of 6,000 English soldiers raisedby the Protector to assist the French against the Spaniards, and to secure England a foot-holdon the Continent. The object of this paper is to show how the two forces were raised, of what regiments they consisted, and by what officers they were commanded. The history of the regiments composing these two little armies will be traced up to the Restoration, and it will be shown how the remains of the Cromwellian contingent and the remains of the royalist force were amalgamated to form the garrison which held Dunkirk for England from 1660 to 1662. Finally I shall endeavour to trace the fate which befell the different regiments of that garrison after Charles II, sold Dunkirk to the French.

In the late fourteenth century the kin' council in England came to have its own secretariat. The old ad hocarrangements for writing its documents were replaced by a paid ‘clerk of the council’ charged to write records of business done and preserving some sort of council archive; by the early fifteenth century it had become normal practice to record not only many decisions but the date and the names of those present at the time; and these arrangements continued unbroken through the fifteenth century and were considerably expanded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sometimes, and this is the exception rather than the rule, somedecisions were entered in books or journals, such as the ‘Book of the Council’ covering the years 1421 to 1435, but the normal method of recording decisions was in the form of endorsements on draft documents or petitions, sometimes in the form of memoranda. In 1500 many thousands of these documents must have existed on the files of chancery and the privy seal, particularly the privy seal, where they had been sent to authorize the issue of letters giving effect to council decisions. Since then, unfortunately, most have been destroyed or dispersed. Some, in general the more striking items, were taken from the files by Sir Robert Cotton, came to the British Museum, and were published by Sir Harris Nicolas in the 1830‘s. The others, the more numerous, are in the Public Record Office in various collections, and are almost entirely unpublished.

It is useful, for the sake of my topic today, that since I declared my title the Republic of Zaire (in May 1997) changed its identity, or at least, resumed one of its former names, the Democratic Republic of Congo. The change is also a nuisance, because the new/old name revives the likelihood of confusion not only with ex-Zaire's neighbour across the Zaire River, the Republic of Congo, but also with the people called BaKongo, who owned the name in the first place. I will try to explain all that in a moment.

In the history of post-war womanhood in Britain, women's self-help organisations are credited with little significance save for ‘helping mothers to do their work more happily’. This paper suggests that the do-it-yourself impetus of the 1960s and 1970s should be regarded as integral to understanding how millions of women negotiated a route towards personal growth and autonomy. Organisations like the National Housewives’ Register, the National Childbirth Trust and the Pre-School Playgroups Association emerged from the grass roots in response to the conundrum faced by women who experienced dissatisfaction and frustration in their domestic role. I argue that these organisations offered thousands of women the opportunity for self-development, self-confidence and independence and that far from being insufficiently critical of dominant models of care, women's self-help operating at the level of the everyday was to be one of the foundations of what would become, by the 1970s, the widespread feminist transformation of women's lives.