Author: James Delbourgo
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737334
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 561
Book Description
In 1759 the British Museum opened its doors to the public—the first free national museum in the world. James Delbourgo recounts the story behind its creation through the life of Hans Sloane, a controversial luminary with an insatiable ambition to pit universal knowledge against superstition and few curbs on his passion for collecting the world.
Collecting the World
Author: James Delbourgo
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737334
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 561
Book Description
In 1759 the British Museum opened its doors to the public—the first free national museum in the world. James Delbourgo recounts the story behind its creation through the life of Hans Sloane, a controversial luminary with an insatiable ambition to pit universal knowledge against superstition and few curbs on his passion for collecting the world.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737334
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 561
Book Description
In 1759 the British Museum opened its doors to the public—the first free national museum in the world. James Delbourgo recounts the story behind its creation through the life of Hans Sloane, a controversial luminary with an insatiable ambition to pit universal knowledge against superstition and few curbs on his passion for collecting the world.
Insuring the Industrial Revolution
Author: Robin Pearson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351927310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374
Book Description
Fire had always been one of the greatest threats to an early modern British society that relied on the naked flame as the prime source of heating, lighting and cooking. Yet whilst the danger of fire had always been taken seriously, it was not until the start of the eighteenth century that a sophisticated system of insurance became widely available. Whilst a number of high profile fires during the seventeenth century had drawn attention to the economic havoc a major conflagration could wreak, it was not until the effects of sustained industrialization began to alter the economic and social balance of the nation, that fire insurance really took off as a concept. The culmination of ten years of research, this book is the definitive work on early British fire insurance. It also provides a foundation for future comparative international studies of this important financial service, and for a greater level of theorising by historians about the relationship between insurance, perceptions of risk, economic development and social change. Through a detailed study of the archives of nearly 50 English and Scottish insurance companies founded between 1696 and 1850 - virtually all the records currently available - together with the construction of many new datasets on output, performance and markets, this book presents one of the most comprehensive histories ever written of a financial service. As well as measuring the size, market structure and growth rate of insurance, and the extent to which the first industrial revolution was insured, it also demonstrates ways in which insurance can be linked into wider issues of economic and social change in Britain. These range from an examination of the joint-stock company form of organization - to an analysis of changing attitudes towards fire hazard during the course of the eighteenth century. The book concludes by emphasising the ambivalent character of fire insurance in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, contrasting the industry's dynamic long-run rate of growth with its more conservative attitude to product design and diversification.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351927310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374
Book Description
Fire had always been one of the greatest threats to an early modern British society that relied on the naked flame as the prime source of heating, lighting and cooking. Yet whilst the danger of fire had always been taken seriously, it was not until the start of the eighteenth century that a sophisticated system of insurance became widely available. Whilst a number of high profile fires during the seventeenth century had drawn attention to the economic havoc a major conflagration could wreak, it was not until the effects of sustained industrialization began to alter the economic and social balance of the nation, that fire insurance really took off as a concept. The culmination of ten years of research, this book is the definitive work on early British fire insurance. It also provides a foundation for future comparative international studies of this important financial service, and for a greater level of theorising by historians about the relationship between insurance, perceptions of risk, economic development and social change. Through a detailed study of the archives of nearly 50 English and Scottish insurance companies founded between 1696 and 1850 - virtually all the records currently available - together with the construction of many new datasets on output, performance and markets, this book presents one of the most comprehensive histories ever written of a financial service. As well as measuring the size, market structure and growth rate of insurance, and the extent to which the first industrial revolution was insured, it also demonstrates ways in which insurance can be linked into wider issues of economic and social change in Britain. These range from an examination of the joint-stock company form of organization - to an analysis of changing attitudes towards fire hazard during the course of the eighteenth century. The book concludes by emphasising the ambivalent character of fire insurance in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, contrasting the industry's dynamic long-run rate of growth with its more conservative attitude to product design and diversification.
The Forgotten Majority
Author: Margrit Schulte Beerbühl
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782384480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
The “forgotten majority” of German merchants in London between the end of the Hanseatic League and the end of the Napoleonic Wars became the largest mercantile Christian immigrant group in the eighteenth century. Using previously neglected and little used evidence, this book assesses the causes of their migration, the establishment of their businesses in the capital, and the global reach of the enterprises. As the acquisition of British nationality was the admission ticket to Britain’s commercial empire, it investigates the commercial function of British naturalization policy in the early modern period, while also considering the risks of failure and chance for a new beginning in a foreign environment. As more German merchants integrated into British commercial society, they contributed to London becoming the leading place of exchange between the European continent, Russia, and the New World.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782384480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
The “forgotten majority” of German merchants in London between the end of the Hanseatic League and the end of the Napoleonic Wars became the largest mercantile Christian immigrant group in the eighteenth century. Using previously neglected and little used evidence, this book assesses the causes of their migration, the establishment of their businesses in the capital, and the global reach of the enterprises. As the acquisition of British nationality was the admission ticket to Britain’s commercial empire, it investigates the commercial function of British naturalization policy in the early modern period, while also considering the risks of failure and chance for a new beginning in a foreign environment. As more German merchants integrated into British commercial society, they contributed to London becoming the leading place of exchange between the European continent, Russia, and the New World.
The Sugar Barons
Author: Matthew Parker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802777988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465
Book Description
Traces the rise and fall of Caribbean sugar dynasties, discussing the Britain's dependence on colony wealth, the role of slavery in sugar plantation culture, and the North American colonial opposition to sugar policy in London.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802777988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465
Book Description
Traces the rise and fall of Caribbean sugar dynasties, discussing the Britain's dependence on colony wealth, the role of slavery in sugar plantation culture, and the North American colonial opposition to sugar policy in London.
Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England
Author: Naomi Tadmor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139429892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
This 2001 book concerns the history of the family in eighteenth-century England. Naomi Tadmor provides an interpretation of concepts of household, family and kinship starting from her analysis of contemporary language (in the diaries of Thomas Turner; in conduct treatises by Samuel Richardson and Eliza Haywood; in three novels, Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa and Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless and a variety of other sources). Naomi Tadmor emphasises the importance of the household in constructing notions of the family in the eighteenth century. She uncovers a vibrant language of kinship which recasts our understanding of kinship ties in the period. She also shows how strong ties of 'friendship' formed vital social, economic and political networks among kin and non-kin. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England makes a substantial contribution to eighteenth-century history, and will be of value to all historians and literary scholars of the period.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139429892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
This 2001 book concerns the history of the family in eighteenth-century England. Naomi Tadmor provides an interpretation of concepts of household, family and kinship starting from her analysis of contemporary language (in the diaries of Thomas Turner; in conduct treatises by Samuel Richardson and Eliza Haywood; in three novels, Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa and Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless and a variety of other sources). Naomi Tadmor emphasises the importance of the household in constructing notions of the family in the eighteenth century. She uncovers a vibrant language of kinship which recasts our understanding of kinship ties in the period. She also shows how strong ties of 'friendship' formed vital social, economic and political networks among kin and non-kin. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England makes a substantial contribution to eighteenth-century history, and will be of value to all historians and literary scholars of the period.
Forging America
Author: John Bezis-Selfa
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
Stacks of stone preside over many bucolic and wooded landscapes in the mid-Atlantic states. Initially constructed more than two hundred years ago, they housed blast furnaces that converted rock and wood into the iron that enabled the United States to secure its national independence. By the eve of the Revolutionary War, furnaces and forges in the American colonies turned out one-seventh of the world's iron.Forging America illuminates the fate of labor in an era when industry, manhood, and independence began to take on new and highly charged meanings. John Bezís-Selfa argues that the iron industry, with its early concentrations of capital and labor, reveals the close links between industrial and political revolution. Through means ranging from religious exhortation to force, ironmasters encouraged or compelled workers—free, indentured, and enslaved—to adopt new work styles and standards of personal industry. Eighteenth-century revolutionary rhetoric hastened the demise of indentured servitude, however, and national independence reinforced the legal status of slavery and increasingly defined manual labor as "dependent" and racially coded. Bezís-Selfa highlights the importance of slave labor to early American industrial development. Research in documents from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries led Bezís-Selfa to accounts of the labor of African-Americans, indentured servants, new immigrants, and others. Their stories inform his highly readable narrative of more than two hundred years of American history.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501722190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
Stacks of stone preside over many bucolic and wooded landscapes in the mid-Atlantic states. Initially constructed more than two hundred years ago, they housed blast furnaces that converted rock and wood into the iron that enabled the United States to secure its national independence. By the eve of the Revolutionary War, furnaces and forges in the American colonies turned out one-seventh of the world's iron.Forging America illuminates the fate of labor in an era when industry, manhood, and independence began to take on new and highly charged meanings. John Bezís-Selfa argues that the iron industry, with its early concentrations of capital and labor, reveals the close links between industrial and political revolution. Through means ranging from religious exhortation to force, ironmasters encouraged or compelled workers—free, indentured, and enslaved—to adopt new work styles and standards of personal industry. Eighteenth-century revolutionary rhetoric hastened the demise of indentured servitude, however, and national independence reinforced the legal status of slavery and increasingly defined manual labor as "dependent" and racially coded. Bezís-Selfa highlights the importance of slave labor to early American industrial development. Research in documents from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries led Bezís-Selfa to accounts of the labor of African-Americans, indentured servants, new immigrants, and others. Their stories inform his highly readable narrative of more than two hundred years of American history.
Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire1688-1775
Author: H. Bowen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230390196
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
This book examines the cultural, economic, and social forces that shaped the development of the British empire in the eighteenth century. The empire is placed in a broad historiographical context informed by important recent work on the 'fiscal-military state', and 'gentlemanly capitalism'. This allows the empire to be seen not as a series of discrete, unconnected geographical regions scattered across the world, but as a commercial, cultural, and social body with its roots very firmly planted in metropolitan society.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230390196
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
This book examines the cultural, economic, and social forces that shaped the development of the British empire in the eighteenth century. The empire is placed in a broad historiographical context informed by important recent work on the 'fiscal-military state', and 'gentlemanly capitalism'. This allows the empire to be seen not as a series of discrete, unconnected geographical regions scattered across the world, but as a commercial, cultural, and social body with its roots very firmly planted in metropolitan society.
Settler Jamaica in the 1750s
Author: Jack P. Greene
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813938325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
By the mid-eighteenth century, observers of the emerging overseas British Empire thought that Jamaica—in addition to being the largest British colony in the West Indies—was the most valuable of the American colonies. Based on a unique set of historical lists and maps, along with a variety of other contemporary materials, Jack Greene’s study provides unparalleled detail about the character of Jamaica’s settler society during the decade of the 1750s, as the first century of British settlement drew to a close. Greene’s sources facilitate a close examination of many aspects of the island’s development at a particularly critical point in its history. Analysis of the data generated from this material permits a fine-grained account of patterns of landholding, economic activity, land use, social organization, and wealth distribution among Jamaica’s free population during a period of sustained demographic, economic, social, and cultural expansion. Calling attention to local variations, the study puts special emphasis on the complexity and vitality of Jamaica’s settler population, the island’s economic and social diversity, the ubiquity and adaptability of slavery, the character and size of settler households, the range of urban professions, the value of urban housing, and the gender and racial dimensions of wealth holding. Greene’s detailed analyses amplify and enrich these subjects, offering the most refined portrait to date of Jamaican society at a crucial juncture in its formation and providing scholars a quantitative base for analyzing Jamaica’s political economy in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813938325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
By the mid-eighteenth century, observers of the emerging overseas British Empire thought that Jamaica—in addition to being the largest British colony in the West Indies—was the most valuable of the American colonies. Based on a unique set of historical lists and maps, along with a variety of other contemporary materials, Jack Greene’s study provides unparalleled detail about the character of Jamaica’s settler society during the decade of the 1750s, as the first century of British settlement drew to a close. Greene’s sources facilitate a close examination of many aspects of the island’s development at a particularly critical point in its history. Analysis of the data generated from this material permits a fine-grained account of patterns of landholding, economic activity, land use, social organization, and wealth distribution among Jamaica’s free population during a period of sustained demographic, economic, social, and cultural expansion. Calling attention to local variations, the study puts special emphasis on the complexity and vitality of Jamaica’s settler population, the island’s economic and social diversity, the ubiquity and adaptability of slavery, the character and size of settler households, the range of urban professions, the value of urban housing, and the gender and racial dimensions of wealth holding. Greene’s detailed analyses amplify and enrich these subjects, offering the most refined portrait to date of Jamaican society at a crucial juncture in its formation and providing scholars a quantitative base for analyzing Jamaica’s political economy in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Public Drinking in the Early Modern World Vol 4
Author: Thomas E Brennan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040249361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541
Book Description
This four-volume reset edition presents a wide-ranging collection of primary sources which uncover the language and behaviour of local and state authorities, of peasants and town-dwellers, and of drinking companions and irate wives.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040249361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541
Book Description
This four-volume reset edition presents a wide-ranging collection of primary sources which uncover the language and behaviour of local and state authorities, of peasants and town-dwellers, and of drinking companions and irate wives.
Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s
Author: Steven King
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773556516
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 483
Book Description
From the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the English Old Poor Law was waning, soon to be replaced by the New Poor Law and its dreaded workhouses. In Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s Steven King reveals colourful stories of poor people, their advocates, and the officials with whom they engaged during this period in British history, distilled from the largest collection of parochial correspondence ever assembled. Investigating the way that people experienced and shaped the English and Welsh welfare system through the use of almost 26,000 pauper letters and the correspondence of overseers in forty-eight counties, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s reconstructs the process by which the poor claimed, extended, or defended their parochial allowances. Challenging preconceptions about literacy, power, social structure, and the agency of ordinary people, these stories suggest that advocates, officials, and the poor shared a common linguistic register and an understanding of how far welfare decisions could be contested and negotiated. King shifts attention away from traditional approaches to construct an unprecedented, comprehensive portrait of poor law administration and popular writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. At a time when the western European welfare model is under sustained threat, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s takes us back to its deepest roots to demonstrate that the signature of a strong welfare system is malleability.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773556516
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 483
Book Description
From the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the English Old Poor Law was waning, soon to be replaced by the New Poor Law and its dreaded workhouses. In Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s Steven King reveals colourful stories of poor people, their advocates, and the officials with whom they engaged during this period in British history, distilled from the largest collection of parochial correspondence ever assembled. Investigating the way that people experienced and shaped the English and Welsh welfare system through the use of almost 26,000 pauper letters and the correspondence of overseers in forty-eight counties, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s reconstructs the process by which the poor claimed, extended, or defended their parochial allowances. Challenging preconceptions about literacy, power, social structure, and the agency of ordinary people, these stories suggest that advocates, officials, and the poor shared a common linguistic register and an understanding of how far welfare decisions could be contested and negotiated. King shifts attention away from traditional approaches to construct an unprecedented, comprehensive portrait of poor law administration and popular writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. At a time when the western European welfare model is under sustained threat, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s takes us back to its deepest roots to demonstrate that the signature of a strong welfare system is malleability.