This is a detailed study of the material lives of the middle classes in the pre-industrial era, a period which saw considerable growth in consumption. Lorna Weatherill has brought her highly important survey up-to-date in the light of new research. She provides a new introduction and bibliography, taking account of the latest academic writing and methodological advances, including computing, and offers further conclusions about her work and its place in current literature. Three main types of documentation are used to construct the overall picture: diaries, household accounts, and probate inventories. In investigating these sources she interprets the social meaning of material goods; and then goes on to relate this evidence to the social structures of Britain by wealth, status and locality. Breaking new ground in focusing on households and the use of probate inventories, Weatherill has provided a book which gives both a general account of the domestic environment of the period, and a scholarly analysis of the data on consumption patterns.

Timespace argues that the old dimensions of time and space do not exist singly, but only as a hybrid process term. the contributors introduce the concepts of time and space together, across a range of disciplines.

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

Until the widespread harnessing of machine energy, food was the energy which fuelled the economy. In this groundbreaking 2011 study of agricultural labourers' diet and material standard of living, Craig Muldrew uses empirical research to present a much fuller account of the interrelationship between consumption, living standards and work in the early modern English economy than has previously existed. The book integrates labourers into a study of the wider economy and engages with the history of food as an energy source and its importance to working life, the social complexity of family earnings, and the concept of the 'industrious revolution'. It argues that 'industriousness' was as much the result of ideology and labour markets as labourers' household consumption. Linking this with ideas about the social order of early modern England, the author demonstrates that bread, beer and meat were the petrol of this world, and a springboard for economic change.

Material from The Agrarian History of England and Wales, in paperback with new introductions.

Property is central to any historical analyses of production, reproduction and consumption. It lies at the heart of discussions of material culture, class relations and the household economy. Recent work has begun to look beyond the acquisition and possession of goods to examine what the disposal, transmission and giving of property might tell us about changing society and culture. This landmark collection of articles represents a wide range of approaches to and perspectives on the ownership, use and transmission of property in eighteenth and nineteenth-century towns. An introductory essay highlights the importance of property and inheritance in shaping social, cultural, economic and political structures and interactions within and between towns and cities. Writing from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, the contributors then explore in detail the changing meaning of property to households and individuals; the social, economic and geographical contexts of inheritance practices; the geography of wealth; the role of gender in shaping property relations and, perhaps above all, the enduring link between property, the family and the household in urban contexts.