The English countryside in the nineteenth century experienced the shifting power struggle from the great landed estates towards democratisation. Challenging received scholarship that the landed estates declined in power and patronage, Bujak places the Victorian globalisation of trade alongside the democratisation of the English countryside. By doing so, he reveals that the economic decline of the great landed estates was balanced by their continued social and political influence in the countryside up to the Great War. With its focus on Suffolk, a county at the forefront of agricultural improvement and thus hardest hit by the agricultural depression, the patterns revealed by "England's Rural Realm" demonstrates the durability of the great estate system across the English countryside.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014 While few detailed surveys of fauna or flora exist in England from the period before the nineteenth century, it is possible to combine the evidence of historical sources (ranging from game books, diaries, churchwardens' accounts and even folk songs) and our wider knowledge of past land use and landscape, with contemporary analyses made by modern natural scientists, in order to model the situation at various times and places in the more remote past. This timely volume encompasses both rural and urban environments from 1650 to the mid-twentieth century, drawing on a wide variety of social, historical and ecological sources. It examines the impact of social and economic organisation on the English landscape, biodiversity, the agricultural revolution, landed estates, the coming of large-scale industry and the growth of towns and suburbs. It also develops an original perspective on the complexity and ambiguity of man/animal relationships in this post-medieval period.

The essays in this collection focus on the ways rural life was represented during the long nineteenth century. Contributors bring expertise from the fields of history, geography and literature to present an interdisciplinary study of the interplay between rural space and gender during a time of increasing industrialization and social change.

The first study on masculinity to focus on the English landed gentry. It covers the period from 1700 to 1900 and is based on several thousand letters written by 19 families. It concentrates on the common experiences of sons' upbringing, particularly schooling, university or business, foreign travel, and the move to family life and fatherhood.

Built Up uncovers the roots of the global real estate industry in the machinations of a patron of Shakespeare, the merged lineages of business savvy women and men, startlingly innovative collaborations with the first English architect, and the radical explorations of other denizens of early modern London – and what those colorful origins mean for the practice of property development today. Uniting insights from the author’s career as an internationally recognized developer with meticulous archival research, this resource for scholars and professionals synthesizes economic history and the latest planning and finance literature. The result is an unprecedented effort to codify the principles and activities of real estate development as a foundation for future academic research and practical innovation. By tracing the evolution of property development to its earliest days, Built Up establishes the theoretical groundwork for the next phase in the transformation of the urban environment.

Marcus Samuel Jr. is an unorthodox Jewish merchant trader. Henri Deterding is a take-no-prisoners oilman. In 1889, John D. Rockefeller is at the peak of his power. Having annihilated all competition and dominating the oil market, even the US government is wary of challenging Standard Oil. The Standard never loses - that is until Samuel and Deterding team up to form Royal Dutch Shell. A riveting account of ambition, oil and greed, Breaking Rockefeller traces Samuel and Deterding's rise to the top of the oil industry, and the collapse of Rockefeller's monopoly.

In the papers collected in this, the first volume of the Spatial Practices series, Englishness is reflected in the spaces it occupies or dwells in. Broadly influenced by a renewed and growing interest in questions of cultural identity, its emergence in Victorian theories and fictions of nationality, and the new cultural geography, the papers cover a rich variety of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: the rural countryside and farmland of the Home Counties in the early nineteenth century as Arcadian idyll in Cobbett, as the land to die for in war propaganda, and as nostalgia for a unified, organic English culture in Lawrence, Morton and Priestley's travel writing, but also in the Shell Tourist Guides to motoring in rural England; English moorland; the sacred geographies of monuments in Hardy and others; the traditional seaside deconstructed in Martin Parr's photography, and the sea as English Victorian imperial territory and its symbolic breezes in Froude's travel writing. The English landscape is also a paradigm for the description of other places in D. H. Lawrence's travel writing or for the colonial territory itself in Rushdie's writing India, a displacement of other landscapes. This collection of papers examines the assumption that constructions of rural England provide the basis for an understanding of Englishness.

Shedding new light on British expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this collection of essays examines how the first British Empire was received and shaped by its subject peoples in Scotland, Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean. An introduction surveys British imperial historiography and provides a context for the volume as a whole. The essays focus on specific ethnic groups -- Native Americans, African-Americans, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch and Germans -- and their relations with the British, as well as on the effects of British expansion in particular regions -- Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and the West Indies. A conclusion assesses the impact of the North American colonies on British society and politics. Taken together, these essays represent a new kind of imperial history -- one that portrays imperial expansion as a dynamic process in which the oulying areas, not only the English center, played an important role in the development and character of the Empire. The collection interpets imperial history broadly, examining it from the perspective of common folk as well as elites and discussing the clash of cultures in addition to political disputes. Finally, by examining shifting and multiple frontiers and by drawing parallels between outlying provinces, these essays move us closer to a truly integrated story that links the diverse ethnic experiences of the first British Empire. The contributors are Bernard Bailyn, Philip D. Morgan, Nicholas Canny, Eric Richards, James H. Merrell, A. G. Roeber, Maldwyn A. Jones, Michael Craton, J. M. Bumsted, and Jacob M. Price.

If one counts the production of constitutional documents alone, the nineteenth century can lay claim to being a 'constitutional age'; one in which the generation and reception of constitutional texts served as a centre of gravity around which law and politics consistently revolved. This volume critically re-examines the role of constitutionalism in that period, in order to counter established teleological narratives that imply a consistent development from absolutism towards inclusive, participatory democracy. Various aspects of constitutional histories within and outside of Europe are examined from a comparative, transnational, and multidisciplinary historical perspective, organized around five key themes. The first part looks at constitutions as anti-revolutionary devices, and addresses state building, monarchical constitutionalism, and restorations. The second part takes up constitutions and the justification of new social inequalities, focusing on women's suffrage, human rights, and property. The third part uses individual country studies to take on questions of how constitutions served to promote nationalism. The use of constitutions as instruments of imperialism is covered in the fourth part, and the final part examines the ways that constitutions function simultaneously as legal and political texts. These themes reflect a certain scepticism regarding any easy relationship between stated constitutional ideals and enacted constitutional practices. Taken together, they also function as a general working hypothesis about the role of constitutions in the establishment and maintenance of a domestically and internationally imbalanced status quo, of which we are the present-day inheritors. More particularly, this volume addresses the question of the extent to which nineteenth-century constitutionalism may have set the stage for new forms of domination and discrimination, rather than inaugurating a period of 'progress' and increasing equality.