Download or read book Collecting the World written by James Delbourgo and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Insuring the Industrial Revolution written by Robin Pearson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Forgotten Majority written by Margrit Schulte Beerbühl and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Sugar Barons written by Matthew Parker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Family and Friends in Eighteenth Century England written by Naomi Tadmor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Forging America written by John Bezis-Selfa and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Elites Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire1688 1775 written by H. Bowen and published by Springer. This book was released on 1996-07-24 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Settler Jamaica in the 1750s written by Jack P. Greene and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Public Drinking in the Early Modern World Vol 4 written by Thomas E Brennan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Writing the Lives of the English Poor 1750s 1830s written by Steven King and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book War State and Society in Mid Eighteenth Century Britain and Ireland written by Stephen Conway and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-01-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the impact of the wars of 1739-63 on Britain and Ireland. The period was dominated by armed struggle between Britain and the Bourbon powers, particularly France. These wars, especially the Seven Years War of 1756-63, saw a considerable mobilization of manpower, materiel and money. They had important affects on the British and Irish economies, on social divisions and the development of what we might term social policy, on popular and parliamentary politics, on religion, on national sentiment, and on the nature and scale of Britain's overseas possessions and attitudes to empire. To fight these wars, partnerships of various kinds were necessary. Partnership with European allies was recognized, at least by parts of the political nation, to be essential to the pursuit of victory. Partnership with the North American colonies was also seen as imperative to military success. Within Britain and Ireland, partnerships were no less important. The peoples of the different nations of the two islands were forced into partnership, or entered into it willingly, in order to fight the conflicts of the period and to resist Bourbon invasion threats. At the level of 'high' politics, the Seven Years War saw the forming of an informal partnership between Whigs and Tories in support of the Pitt-Newcastle government's prosecution of the war. The various Protestant denominations - established churches and Dissenters - were brought into a form of partnership based on Protestant solidarity in the face of the Catholic threat from France and Spain. And, perhaps above all, partnerships were forged between the British state and local and private interest in order to secure the necessary mobilization of men, resources, and money.

Download or read book Gendering the African Diaspora written by Judith Ann-Marie Byfield and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume builds on and extends current discussions of the construction of gendered identities and the networks through which men and women engage diaspora. It considers the movement of people and ideas between the Caribbean and the Nigerian hinterland. The contributions examine Africa in the Caribbean imaginary, the way in which gender ideologies inform Caribbean men's and women's theoretical or real-life engagement with the continent, and the interactions and experiences of Caribbean travelers in Africa and Europe. The contributions are linked as well through empire, discussing different parts of the British Empire and allowing for the comparative examination of colonial policies and practices."--Back cover.

Download or read book Persuasion and Propaganda written by Joan Coutu and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2006-08-23 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lavishly illustrated, Persuasion and Propaganda is the first study of these works of art within the framework of colonial politics and political culture. While examining the rise of the idea of the public in the modern world, Joan Coutu also explores how "empire" was constantly being redefined. From private funeral monuments in the West Indies to works erected by the East India Company and the British Parliament, Coutu shows how the youthful British Empire saw itself and validated its mission through sculpture.

Download or read book The National Church in Local Perspective written by Jeremy Gregory and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political, social and economic role of the Church in the various regions of England, identifying common themes and highlighting regional differences.

Download or read book The New England Historical and Genealogical Register written by and published by . This book was released on 1849 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in 1924, Proceedings are incorporated into the Apr. number.

Download or read book West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783 1807 written by David Ryden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-19 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ryden challenges conventional wisdom regarding the political and economic motivations behind the final decision to abolish the British slave trade in 1807. His research illustrates that a faltering sugar economy after 1799 tipped the scales in favour of the abolitionist argument and helped secure the passage of abolition.

Download or read book The Harvard Guide to African American History written by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 968 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for womens' issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries.