This volume of essays seeks to offer a radical re-evaluation of most of our preconceptions about the early-modern English social order. This book attempts to define the term "middle classes" and treat them as active participants of history, rather than as a simple by-product.

"A very full, nuanced, up-to-date, and lucidly expressed account. . . . The discussion is impressively wide-ranging (spanning cultural, economic, intellectual, social, and women's history), and makes valuable contributions to a number of current debates."--Johann Sommerville "A very full, nuanced, up-to-date, and lucidly expressed account. . . . The discussion is impressively wide-ranging (spanning cultural, economic, intellectual, social, and women's history), and makes valuable contributions to a number of current debates."--Johann Sommerville

This title will appeal to scholars and students of early modern social and economic history in England.

The rise of social history has had a transforming influence on the history of early modern England. It has broadened the historical agenda to include many previously little-studied, or wholly neglected, dimensions of the English past. It has also provided a fuller context for understanding more established themes in the political, religious, economic and intellectual histories of the period. This volume serves two main purposes. Firstly, it summarises, in an accessible way, the principal findings of forty years of research on English society in this period, providing a comprehensive overview of social and cultural change in an era vital to the development of English social identities. Second, the chapters, by leading experts, also stimulate fresh thinking by not only taking stock of current knowledge but also extending it, identifying problems, proposing fresh interpretations and pointing to unexplored possibilities. It will be essential reading for students, teachers and general readers.

Examines debt insecurity in eighteenth-century Britain, a period of famously rapid economic growth when many people nevertheless experienced financial failure.

This text challenges American notions of democracy and ambition, culture and civic responsibility, charting a decline in democratic values and debate. It states that this change is due to the "new elites" who, having lost their sense of communitarianism, will not accept ties to nation and to place.

This second volume of John Rule's major two-volume portrait of Georgian England is a comprehensive and authoritative survey of eighteenth-century society, incorporating the exciting new research findings of recent years. It deals in turn with the upper class, `middling sort' and lower orders; with popular education, religion and culture; with standards of living in town and country; and with crime, punishment and protest. The book, which is as rich and varied as the age it explores, ends with an assessment of continuity and change across the century.

Reconstructs the distinctive relationship between the house and masculinity in the eighteenth century; adds a missing piece to the history of the home, uncovering the hopes and fears men had for their homes and families. Reveals how the public identity of men has always depended, to a considerable extent, upon the roles they performed within doors.

To be one of "the middling sort" in urban England in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century was to live a life tied, one way or another, to the world of commerce. In a lively study that combines narrative and alternately poignant and hilarious anecdotes with convincing analysis, Margaret R. Hunt offers a view of middling society during the hundred years that separated the Glorious Revolution from the factory age. Thanks to her exploration of many family papers and court records, Hunt is able to examine what people thought, felt, and valued. She finds that early capitalism and early modern family life were far more insecure than their "classical" models supposed. Commercial needs and social needs coincided to a large extent. The family is central to Hunt's story, and she shows how financial struggles brought conflict, ambiguity, and tension to the home. She investigates the way gender intertwined with class and family hierarchy and the way many businesses survived as precarious successes, secured through the sacrifices made by female as well as male family members. The Middling Sort offers a dynamic portrait of a society struggling to minimize the considerable social and psychic dislocation that accompanied England's launch of a full-scale market economy.

This fascinating book offers the first sustained investigation of the complex relationship between the middling sort and their domestic space in the tumultuous, rapidly changing culture of early modern England. Presented in an innovative and engaging narrative form that follows the pattern of a typical day from early morning through the middle of the night, A Day at Home in Early Modern England examines the profound influence that the domestic material environment had on structuring and expressing modes of thought and behaviour of relatively ordinary people. With a multidisciplinary approach that takes both extant objects and documentary sources into consideration, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson recreate the layered complexity of lived household experience and explore how a family's investment in rooms, decoration, possessions, and provisions served to define not only their status, but the social, commercial, and religious concerns that characterised their daily existence. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art