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  3. People, Markets, Goods: Economies and Societies in History

The interactions of economy and society, people and goods, transactions and actions are at the root of most human behaviours. Economic and social historians are participants in the same conversation about how markets have developed historically and how they have been constituted by economic actors and agencies in various social, institutional and geographical contexts. New debates now underpin much research in economic and social, cultural, demographic, urban and political history. Their themes have enduring resonance � financial stability and instability, the costs of health and welfare, the implications of poverty and riches, flows of trade and the centrality of communications. This new paperback series aims to attract historians interested in economics and economists with an interest in history by publishing high quality, cutting edge academic research in the broad field of economic and social history from the late medieval/early modern period to the present day. It encourages the interaction of qualitative and quantitative methods through both excellent monographs and collections offering path-breaking overviews of key research concerns. Taking as its benchmark international relevance and excellence it is open to scholars and subjects of any geographical areas from the case study to the multi-nation comparison.Series Editors: Nigel Goose (University of Hertfordshire), Steve Hindle (Huntington Library, San Marino, California), Jane Humphries (University of Oxford) and Kevin O�Rourke (University of Oxford)

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19 results in People, Markets, Goods: Economies and Societies in History

Family Firms in Postwar Britain and Germany
  • Competing Approaches to Business
  • David Paulson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    10 January 2024
    Print publication:
    21 February 2023
  • Examines the culture and conduct of six small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in England and West Germany from 1945 to the late-1970s, drawing on numerous archives in Germany and Britain.

Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England
  • James Raven
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 February 2023
    Print publication:
    18 September 2014
  • Many more people encountered newspapers, business press products or jobbing print than the glamorous books of the Enlightenment. This book looks at the way in which print effected a business revolution.

Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Britain, 1290–1834

Globalized Peripheries
  • Central Europe and the Atlantic World, 1680-1860
  • Edited by Jutta Wimmler, Klaus Weber
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    18 January 2023
    Print publication:
    19 June 2020
  • Globalized Peripheries examines the commodity flows and financial ties within Central and Eastern Europe in order to situate these regions as important contributors to Atlantic trade networks.

The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain’s Financial Crisis
  • Charles Read
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 December 2022
    Print publication:
    25 October 2022
  • Rich in archival detail and offering a ground-breaking analysis, this book presents a radically new interpretation of British politics and policy failings during the Great Famine.

Slavery Hinterland
  • Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680-1850
  • Edited by Felix Brahm, Eve Rosenhaft
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 June 2021
    Print publication:
    16 June 2016
  • Slavery Hinterland explores a neglected aspect of transatlantic slavery: the implication of a continental European hinterland. It focuses on historical actors in territories that were not directly involved in the traffic in Africans but linked in various ways with the transatlantic slave business, the plantation economies that it fed and the consequences of its abolition. The volume unearths material entanglements of the Continental and Atlantic economies and also proposes a new agenda for the historical study of the relationship between business and morality. Contributors from the US,Britain and continental Europe examine the ways in which the slave economy touched on individual lives and economic developments in German-speaking Europe, Switzerland, Denmark and Italy. They reveal how these 'hinterlands' served as suppliers of investment, labour and trade goods for the slave trade and of materials for the plantation economies, and how involvement in trade networks contributed in turn to key economic developments in the 'hinterlands'. The chapters range in time from the first, short-lived attempt at establishing a German slave-trading operation in the 1680s to the involvement of textile manufacturers in transatlantic trade in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. A key theme of the volume is the question of conscience, or awareness of being morally implicated in an immoral enterprise. Evidence for subjective understandings of the moral challenge of slavery is found in individual actions and statements and also in post-abolition colonisation and missionary projects.

    FELIX BRAHM is Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in London.

    EVE ROSENHAFT is Professor of German Historical Studies, University of Liverpool.

    CONTRIBUTORS: Felix Brahm, Peter Haenger, Catherine Hall, Daniel P. Hopkins, Craig Koslofsky, Sarah Lentz, Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, Anne Sophie Overkamp, Alexandra Robinson, Eve Rosenhaft, Anka Steffen, Klaus Weber, Roberto Zaugg

Money and Markets

Quakers in the British Atlantic World, c.1660–1800
  • Esther Sahle
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 March 2021
    Print publication:
    21 May 2021
  • Examines the two largest Quaker communities in the early modern British Atlantic World, and scrutinizes the role of Quaker merchants and the business ethics they followed.

Financing Cotton
  • British Industrial Growth and Decline, 1780–2000
  • Steven Toms
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    01 October 2020
    Print publication:
    19 June 2020
  • This book links the world of finance directly to the fate of the cotton and textile industry, long a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain as a manufacturing economy, for the first time.

Women and the Land, 1500–1900

The Age of Machinery
  • Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770–1850
  • Volume 12
  • Gillian Cookson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2019
    Print publication:
    16 February 2018
  • An engagingly written account of textile engineering in its key northern centres, rich with historical narrative and analysis.

Shoplifting in Eighteenth-Century England
  • Volume 13
  • Tickell Shelley
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 August 2018
    Print publication:
    17 August 2018
  • As a new consumer culture took root in eighteenth-century England and shops proliferated, the crime of shoplifting leaped to public prominence.

Cameralism in Practice
  • State Administration and Economy in Early Modern Europe
  • Edited by Marten Seppel, Keith Tribe
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    16 May 2018
    Print publication:
    31 October 2017
  • This book discusses the impact of cameralism on the practices of governance, early modern state-building and economy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. It argues that the cameralist conception of state and economy - a form of 'science' of government dedicated to reforming society while promoting economic development, and often associated mainly with Prussia - had significant impact far beyond Germany and Austria. In fact, its influence spread into Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Portugal, Northern Italy and other parts of Europe. In this volume, an international set of experts discusses administrative practices and policies in relation to population, forestry, proto-industry, trade, mining affairs, education, police regulation, and insurance. The book will appeal to early modernists, economic historians and historians of economic thought. MARTEN SEPPEL is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. KEITH TRIBE has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and taught at the University of Keele (UK) from 1976 to 2002, retiring as Reader in Economics. He is now working as a highly regarded professional translator and independent scholar. Forthcoming work includes a new translation of Max Weber, Economy and Society Part One (Harvard University Press, 2018). His publications include Strategies of Economic Order (CUP, 1995/2007); The Economy of the Word. Language, History, and Economics (OUP, 2015); and (edited with Pat Hudson) The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Agenda, 2016). Contributors: ROGER BARTLETT, ALEXANDRE MENDES CUNHA, HANS FRAMBACH, GUILLAUME GARNER, LARS MAGNUSSON, INGRID MARKUSSEN, FRANK OBERHOLZNER, GÖRAN RYDÉN, MARTEN SEPPEL, KEITH TRIBE, PAUL WARDE

Servants in Rural Europe
  • 1400–1900
  • Edited by Jane Whittle
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    18 April 2018
    Print publication:
    30 November 2017
  • This is the first book to survey the experience of servants in rural Europe from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Live-in servants were a distinctive element of early modern society. They were typically young adults aged between 16 and 24 who lived and worked in other people's households before marriage. Servants tended to be employed for long periods, several months to years at a time, and were paid with food and lodging as well as cash wages. Both women and men worked as servants in large numbers. Unlike domestic servants in towns and wealthy households, rural servants typically worked on farms and were an important element of the agricultural workforce. Historians have viewed service as a distinct life-cycle stage between childhood and marriage. It brought both freedom and servility for young people. It allowed them to leave home and earn a living before marriage, whilst learning a range of agricultural and craft skills which reduced their dependence on their parents and increased their choice in marriage partners. Still, servants had limited rights: they were under the authority of their employer, with a similar legal status to children. In many countries the employment of servants was tightly controlled by law. Servants could demand their wages, and leave when the contract ended, but had to work long hours and had little say in their work tasks during employment. While some servants effectively became family members, trusted and cared for, others were abused physically and sexually by their employers. This collection features a range of methodologies, reflecting the variety of source materials and approaches available to historians of this topic in a range of European countries and time periods. Nonetheless, it demonstrates the strong common themes that emerge from studying servants and will be of particular interest to historians of work, gender, the family, agriculture, economic development, youth and social structure. JANE WHITTLE is Professor of Rural History at the University of Exeter. Contributors: CHRISTINE FERTIG, JEREMY HAYHOE, SARAH HOLLAND, THIJS LAMBRECHT, CHARMIAN MANSELL, HANNE ØSTHUS, RICHARD PAPING, CRISTINA PRYTZ, RAFFAELLA SARTI, CAROLINA UPPENBERG, LIES VERVAET, JANE WHITTLE

People, Places and Business Cultures
  • Essays in Honour of Francesca Carnevali
  • Edited by Andrew Popp, Paolo Di Martino, Peter Scott
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    17 March 2017
  • This collection brings together new research into nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and European economic history, socio-cultural history and business history. It is inspired by the work and legacy of Francesca Carnevali who, throughout her career, encouraged a lively dialogue between these different disciplines. The book offers innovative views and perspectives on key debates and emphasises the connections between economic environments and wider social and cultural elements. It also considers methodological issues and emerging approaches in economic history. Topics include banks and business finance in the nineteenth century, mass-market retailing and class demarcations, economic microhistory, and comparative history and capitalism. Economic, business, social and cultural historians alike will find it of interest.

    PAOLO DI MARTINO is Senior Lecturer in International Business History at the Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham.
    ANDREW POPP is Professor of Business History at the University of Liverpool.
    PETER SCOTT is Professor of International Business History at the University of Reading's Henley Business School and Director of Henley's Centre for International Business History.

    CONTRIBUTORS: Andrea Colli, Paolo Di Martino, Leslie Hannah, Matthew Hilton, Ken Lipartito, Lucy Newton, Andrew Popp, Peter Scott, Anna Spadavecchia, James Walker, Chris Wickham.

Almshouses in Early Modern England
  • Charitable Housing in the Mixed Economy of Welfare, 1550-1725
  • Angela Nicholls
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    29 July 2017
    Print publication:
    17 March 2017
  • Almshouses providing accommodation for poor people are a common feature of the towns and villages of England, visible representations of historic attitudes towards the poor. The period after the Reformation saw not only the survival of many medieval institutions but also a remarkable number of new foundations, as people from many different backgrounds used their wealth to revive and remodel this ancient form of provision to meet new needs. This book addresses a neglected element of English welfare history, examining the role and significance of English almshouses in the period 1550 - 1725 andthe contribution they made within the developing welfare systems of the time.
    Drawing on archival evidence, the book analyses why almshouses were founded and the reasons for the continuing popularity of this particular form of charity; who the occupants were; what benefits they received; and how residents were expected to live their lives. It challenges the assumption that Post-Reformationalmshouses were places of privilege for the respectable deserving poor and reveals a surprising variation in the socio-economic status of almspeople and their experience of almshouse life. The book places these findings in the context of the contemporary national and local debates about poverty and poor relief and argues that early modern almshouses took on a distinct and new identity within thechanged landscape of relief provision in post-Reformation England. Many almshouses played an integral role in the early welfare provision of their local communities, yet, ultimately, their significance was affected by the emergence of harsher public provision in the new workhouses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

    ANGELA NICHOLLS is Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick.

The First Century of Welfare
  • Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, 1620–1730
  • Jonathan Healey
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 November 2014
    Print publication:
    18 September 2014
  • The English 'Old Poor Law' was the first national system of tax-funded social welfare in the world. It provided a safety net for hundreds of thousands of paupers at a time of very limited national wealth and productivity. "The First Century of Welfare", which focusses on the poor, but developing, county of Lancashire, provides the first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century. Drawing on thousands of individual petitions for poor relief, presented by paupers themselves to magistrates, it peers into the social and economic world of England's marginal people. Taken together, these records present a vivid and sobering picture of the daily lives and struggles of the poor. We can see how their family life, their relations with their kin and their neighbours, and the dictates of contemporary gender norms conditioned their lives. We can also see how they experienced illness and physical and mental disability; and the ways in which real people's lives could be devastated by dearth, trade depression, and the destruction of the Civil Wars. But the picture is not just one of poor folk tossed by the tides of fortune. It is also one of agency: about the strategies of economic survival the poor adopted, particularly in the context of a developing industrial economy, of the support they gained from their relatives and neighbours, and of their willingness to engage with England's developing system of social welfare to ensure that they and their families did not go hungry. In this book, an intensely human picture surfaces of what it was like to experience poverty at a time when the seeds of state social welfare were being planted. JONATHAN HEALEY is University Lecturer in English Local and Social History and Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780–1850
  • Peter Kirby
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 September 2014
    Print publication:
    19 September 2013
  • Historians have long recognised the importance of child health during the Industrial Revolution, but few have explored the health of working children in any analytical detail. In this comprehensive study, Peter Kirby places the occupational health of employed children within a broad context of social, industrial and environmental change during the period 1780 to 1850. The book explores the deformities, fevers, respiratory complaints, industrial injuries and physical ill-treatment which have long been associated with child labour in the factory workplace. The result is a more nuanced picture of child health and child labour during the classic 'factory age' which raises important questions about the enduring stereotype of the health-impaired and abused industrial child. Peter Kirby is Professor of Social History and Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440-1660
  • Tawney's 'Agrarian Problem' Revisited
  • Edited by Jane Whittle
  • With contributions by Christopher Brooks , Christopher Dyer , Heather Falvey , Harold Garrett-Goodyear , Julian Goodare , Elizabeth Griffiths , Jennifer Holt , Briony McDonagh , Jean Morrin , David Ormrod , William D. Shannon and Andy Wood
  • Foreword by Keith Wrightson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    15 August 2013
  • This volume revisits a classic book by a famous historian: R.H. Tawney's 'Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century' (1912). Tawney's 'Agrarian Problem' surveyed landlord-tenant relations in England between 1440 and 1660, the period of emergent capitalism and rapidly changing property relations that stands between the end of serfdom and the more firmly capitalist system of the eighteenth century. This transition period is widely recognised as crucial to Britain's long term economic development, laying the foundation for the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. Remarkably, Tawney's book has remained the standard text on landlord-tenant relations for over a century. Here, Tawney's book is re-evaluated by leading experts in agrarian and legal history, taking its themes as a departure point to provide for a new interpretation of the agrarian economy in late Tudor and early modern Britain. The introduction looks at how Tawney's 'Agrarian Problem' was written, its place in the historiography of agrarian England and the current state of research. Survey chapters examine the late medieval period, a comparison with Scotland, and Tawney's conception of capitalism, whilst the remaining chapters focus on four issues that were central to Tawney's arguments: enclosure disputes, the security of customary tenure; the conversion of customary tenure to leasehold; and other landlord strategies to raise revenues. The balance of power between landlords and tenants determined how the wealth of agrarian England was divided in this crucial period of economic development - this book reveals how this struggle was played out. JANE WHITTLE is professor of rural history at Exeter University. Contributors: Christopher Brooks, Christopher Dyer, Heather Falvey, Harold Garrett-Goodyear, Julian Goodare, Elizabeth Griffiths, Jennifer Holt, Briony McDonagh, Jean Morrin, David Ormrod, William D. Shannon, Jane Whittle, Andy Wood. Foreword by Keith Wrightson