This book offers the first comprehensive study of the enclosure mapping of England and Wales. Enclosure maps are fundamental sources of evidence in many types of historical inquiries. Although modern historians tend to view these large-scale maps essentially as sources of data on past economies and societies, this book argues that enclosure maps had a much more active role at the time they were compiled. Seen from this perspective of their contemporary society, enclosure maps are not simply antiquarian curiosities, cultural artefacts, or useful sources for historians but instruments of land reorganisation and control which both reflected and consolidated the power of those who commissioned them. The book is accompanied by a fully searchable, descriptive and analytical web catalogue of all parliamentary and non-parliamentary enclosure maps extant in public archives and libraries and offers an essential research tool for economic, social and local historians and for geographers, lawyers and planners.

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Because the poor lacked land of their own, public spaces were needed for their sports and pastimes.

Challenging the view that England had no peasantry or that it had disappeared before industrialization, this text shows that common right and petty landholding shaped social relations in English villages. Their loss at enclosure sharpened social antagonisms and imprinted a pervasive sense of loss.

Britain in the sixteenth century appeared little different from its European neighbours, and shared their renewed 'Malthusian' pressures, as population growth threatened the resource base of the economy. Yet, by the later seventeenth century, Britain had broken the limits imposed by food production. With the development of its trade, transport and industry, and the effective integration of its economy as a whole, the country was becoming by the later eighteenth century more urban and industrial than its neighbours, and was rapidly overtaking the Netherlands as the least 'rural' country in Europe. This volume of key readings sets British development in its broad context and, in presenting the strong evidence of the extent and nature of its economic advance in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, provides the critical backgrond for the understanding of the late process of British industrialization.

With this book, Allan Kulikoff offers a sweeping new interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, he tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, analyzes the growth of markets, and assesses the impact of the Revolution on small farm society. Beginning with the dispossession of the peasantry in early modern England, Kulikoff follows the immigrants across the Atlantic to explore how they reacted to a hostile new environment and its Indian inhabitants. He discusses how colonists secured land, built farms, and bequeathed those farms to their children. Emphasizing commodity markets in early America, Kulikoff shows that without British demand for the colonists' crops, settlement could not have begun at all. Most important, he explores the destruction caused during the American Revolution, showing how the war thrust farmers into subsistence production and how they only gradually regained their prewar prosperity.

William Faden's map of Norfolk, published in 1797, was one of a large number of surveys of English counties produced in the second half of the eighteenth century. This book, with accompanying DVD, presents a new digital version of the map, and explains how this can be interrogated to produce a wealth of new historical information. It discusses the making of the Norfolk map, and Faden's own career, within the wider context of the eighteenth-century "cartographic revolution". It explores what the map, and others like it, can tell us about contemporary social and economic geography. But it also shows how, carefully examined, the map can also inform us about the development of the Norfolk landscape in much more remote periods of time. The book includes a digital version of the map, on DVD. Andrew Macnair is Research Fellow at the School of History in the University of East Anglia; Tom Williamson is Professor of History and Head of the Landscape Group at the University of East Anglia.

This fascinating book looks at how local history developed from the antiquarian county studies of the sixteenth century through the growth of 'professional' history in the nineteenth century, to the recent past. Concentrating on the past sixty years, it looks at the opening of archive offices, the invigorating influence of family history, the impact of adult education and other forms of lifelong learning. The author considers the debates generated by academics, including the divergence of views over local and regional issues, and the importance of standards set by the Victoria County History (VCH). Also discussed is the fragmentation of the subject. The antiquarian tradition included various subject areas that are now separate disciplines, among them industrial archaeology, name studies, family, landscape and urban history. This is an authoritative account of how local history has come to be one of the most popular and productive intellectual pastimes in our modern society. Written by a practitioner who has spent more than twenty years teaching local history to undergraduates and M.A. students, as well as lecturing to local history societies, John Beckett is currently Director of the VCH. A remarkable book that will be of great interest to students and scholars of local history as well as amateur and professional genealogists.

This is a book for those thousands of family historians who have already made some progress in tracing their family tree and have become interested in the places where their ancestors lived, worked and raised children. It emphasises the diversity and extraordinary complexity of the rural and urban communities in provincial England even before the great changes associated with the Industrial Revolution.