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.

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.

"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 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.

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

This volume of essays seeks to offer a radical re-evaluation of most of our preconceptions about the early-modern English social order. The majority of people who lived in early-modern England were neither very rich nor very poor, yet a disproportionate amount of historiography has been directed towards precisely these groups. This book intends to define the term 'middle classes' and treat them as active participants of history, rather than as a simple by-product rising and falling according to others' activities.

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 is the first major study of a neglected yet extremely significant subject: the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730, a period in which they created a society and economy that can be seen with hindsight to have ushered in the modern world. Using a wealth of material from contemporary sources--including wills, business papers, inventories, marriage contracts, divorce hearings, and the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys--Peter Earle presents a fully rounded picture of the "middling sort of people," getting to the hearts of their lives as men and women struggling for success in the biggest, richest, and most middle-class city in contemporary Europe. He examines in fascinating and convincing detail the business life of Londoners, from apprenticeship through the problems and potential rewards of different occupational groups, going on to look at middle-class family, social, political and material life--from relationships with spouses, children, servants, and neighbors, to food and clothes and furniture, to sickness, death, and burial. Stimulating, scholarly, and constantly illuminating, this book is an important and impressive contribution to English social history.

Keith Thomas's earlier studies in the ethnography of early modern England, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Man and the Natural World, and The Ends of Life, were all attempts to explore beliefs, values, and social practices in the centuries from 1500 to 1800. In Pursuit of Civility continues this quest by examining what English people thought it meant to be "civilized" and how that condition differed from being "barbarous" or "savage." Thomas shows that the upper ranks of society sought to distinguish themselves from their social inferiors by distinctive ways of moving, speaking, and comporting themselves, and that the common people developed their own form of civility. The belief of the English in their superior civility shaped their relations with the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish, and was fundamental to their dealings with the native peoples of North America, India, and Australia. Yet not everyone shared this belief in the superiority of Western civilization; the book sheds light on the origins of both anticolonialism and cultural relativism. Thomas has written an accessible history based on wide reading, abounding in fresh insights, and illustrated by many striking quotations and anecdotes from contemporary sources.