This book reinterprets London's role in the defeat of Charles I in the English Civil War.

Historians typically regard the British Empire as a state project aided by corporations. Philip Stern turns this view on its head, arguing that corporations drove colonial expansion and governance, creating an overlap between sovereign and commercial power that continues to shape the relationship between nations and corporations to this day.

This volume is based on possibly the biggest single Europe-wide project in urban history. In 1955 the International Commission for the History of Towns established the European historic towns atlas project in accordance with a common scheme in order to encourage comparative urban studies. Although advances in urban archaeology since the 1960s have highlighted the problematic relationship between the oldest extant town plan and the actual origins of a town, the large-scale cadastral maps as they have been made available by the European historic towns atlas project are still necessary if we want to understand the evolution of the physical form of our towns. By 2014 the project consisted of over 500 individual publications from over 18 different countries across Europe. Each atlas comprises at least a core-map at the scale of 1:2500, analytical maps and an explanatory text. The time has come to use this enormous database that has been compiled over the last 40 years. This volume, itself based on a conference related to this topic that was held in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin in 2006, takes up this challenge. The focus of the volume is on the question of how seigneurial power influenced the creation of towns in medieval Europe and of how this process in turn influenced urban form. Part I of the volume addresses two major issues: the history of the use of town plans in urban research and the methodological challenges of comparative urban history. Parts II and III constitute the core of the book focusing on the dynamic relationship between lordship and town planning in the core area of medieval Europe and on the periphery. In Part IV the symbolic meaning of town plans for medieval people is discussed. Part V consists of critical contributions by an archaeologist, an art historian and an historical geographer. By presenting case studies by leading researchers from different European countries, this volume combines findings that were hitherto not available in English. A comparison of the English and German bibliographies, attached to this volume, reveals some interesting insights as to how the focus of research shifted over time. The book also shows how work on urban topography integrates the approaches of the historian, archaeologist and historical geographer. The narrative of medieval urbanization becomes enriched and the volume is a genuine contribution to European studies.

A History of Settlement in Ireland provides a stimulating and thought-provoking overview of the settlement history of Ireland from prehistory to the present day. Particular attention is paid to the issues of settlement change and distribution within the contexts of: * environment * demography * culture. The collection goes further by setting the agenda for future research in this rapidly expanding area of academic interest. This volume will be essential reading for all those with an interest in the archaeology, history and social geography of Ireland.

Based upon the most extensive early banking archive known to survive, this book is the first major study of Stuart banking since R. D. Richards's The Early History of Banking in England (1928). It traces the origins and growth of banking from the late sixteenth century to the 1720s through two generations of a scriveners' bank established in 1638 by Robert Abbott, and perpetuated by his nephew, Robert Clayton, and John Morris. With deposits from landowners' rents and stock sales these bankers practised as moneylenders and money-brokers for another sector of the gentry needing capital to offset the effects of the Great Rebellion and an agricultural depression. After 1660 Clayton and Morris integrated mortgage security into banking practice. This study examines the elaborate stages of land assessment and legal change which enabled bankers to offer large-scale, long-term securities to their clients, a pattern followed later by other banks such as Childs, Hoares, Martins and Coutts.

This book examines the native Irish experience of conquest and colonisation in Ulster in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Central to this argument is that the Ulster plantation bears more comparisons to European expansion throughout the Atlantic than (as some historians have argued) the early-modern state’s consolidation of control over its peripheral territories. Farrell also demonstrates that plantation Ulster did not see any significant attempt to transform the Irish culturally or economically in these years, notwithstanding the rhetoric of a ‘civilising mission’. Challenging recent scholarship on the integrative aspects of plantation society, he argues that this emphasis obscures the antagonism which characterised relations between native and newcomer until the eve of the 1641 rising. This book is of interest not only to students of early-modern Ireland but is also a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of Atlantic history and indeed colonial studies in general.

Colonial Transformations covers early modern English poetry and plays, Gaelic poetry, and a wide range of English colonial propaganda. In the book, Bach contends that England's colonial ambitions surface in all of its literary texts. Those texts played multiple roles in England's colonial expansions and emerging imperialism. Those roles included publicizing colonial efforts, defining some people as white and some as barbarians, constituting enduring stereotypes of native people, and resisting official versions of colonial encounters.

In the late sixteenth century, the English started expanding westward, establishing control over parts of neighboring Ireland as well as exploring and later colonizing distant North America. Audrey Horning deftly examines the relationship between British colonization efforts in both locales, depicting their close interconnection as fields for colonial experimentation. Focusing on the Ulster Plantation in the north of Ireland and the Jamestown settlement in the Chesapeake, she challenges the notion that Ireland merely served as a testing ground for British expansion into North America. Horning instead analyzes the people, financial networks, and information that circulated through and connected English plantations on either side of the Atlantic. In addition, Horning explores English colonialism from the perspective of the Gaelic Irish and Algonquian societies and traces the political and material impact of contact. The focus on the material culture of both locales yields a textured specificity to the complex relationships between natives and newcomers while exposing the lack of a determining vision or organization in early English colonial projects.

Current approaches to the archaeological understanding of permanence and transience in the early modern period, Can we approach European expansion to the Americas and elsewhere without colonial triumphalism? A research strategy which automatically treats early establishments overseas as embryonic colonies produces predictable results: in retrospect, some were, some were not. The approach reflected in the essays collected here does not exclude an interest in colonialism as an enduring practice, but the focus of the volume is population mobility and stability. Post-medieval archaeology has much to contribute to our understanding of the gradual drift of ordinary people - the cast of thousands, anonymous or almost-forgotten behind the famous names of history. The main concern of the articles here is the post-medieval expansion of the English-speaking world to North America, particularly Newfoundland and the Chesapeake, but the volume includes perspectives on Ireland and New France also. While most attend to the movement of Europeans, interactions with Native peoples, using the Labrador Inuit as a case study, are not neglected. PETER E. POPE was University Research Professor and former Head of the Department of Archaeology at Memorial University in St John's, Newfoundland; SHANNON LEWIS-SIMPSON researches aspects of cultural identity and interaction in the Viking-Age North Atlantic. She lectures part-time at Memorial University. Contributors: Eliza Brandy, Mark Brisbane, Amanda Crompton, Bruno Fajal, Amelia Fay, David Gaimster, Mark Gardiner, Barry Gaulton, William Gilbert, Audrey Horning, Carter C. Hudgins, Silas Hurry, Evan Jones, Neil Kennedy, Eric Klingelhofer, Hannah E.C. Koon, Brad Loewen, Nicholas Luccketti, James Lyttleton, Tânia Manuel Casimiro, Paula Marcoux, Natascha Mehler, Greg Mitchell, Sarah Newstead, Stéphane Noël, Jeff Oliver, Steven E. Pendery, Peter E. Pope, Peter Ramsden, Lisa Rankin, Amy St John, Beverley Straube, Eric Tourigny, James A. Tuck, Giovanni Vitelli,