This book provides a detailed account of how Bristol was transformed by a growing population, industrial change, technological innovation and urban expansion over the course of the nineteenth century. Overshadowed by more economically vibrant towns of the industrial north, Bristol's prospects in 1800 were far from certain. This book provides a detailed account of how Bristol was transformed by a growing population, industrial change, technological innovation and urban expansion over the course of the nineteenth century. It explores the development of the physical fabric of the city, looking at the impact on the landscape of new types of buildings, increased housing and the repurposing of older areas, the growth of manufacturing, and the disruptive technologies of the railways and steam-powered ships. The book examines how the population responded to the opportunities, and challenges, afforded by national economic growth and world trade and which groups had the power to decide what solutions should be adopted. Finally, it considers the growing influence of central government on local decisions in relationto issues such as public health, education and housing. The book offers a distinctive and original contribution not only to the historiography of Bristol, but also to the study of urbanisation in nineteenth-century Britain in general. PETER MALPASS is Emeritus Professor of Housing and Urban Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

Professor David Bebbington is a highly regarded historian. He holds a chair at the University of Stirling, has been President of the Ecclesiastical History Society, and has delivered numerous endowed lecture series, as well as being deeply involved in the Dr Williams’s Dissenting Academies Project. He is both a popular and influential academic historian, whose writings have significantly shaped our thinking about the history of evangelicalism, Baptist life, and political developments. In Pathways and Patterns, colleagues, former research students and friends who are indebted to Professor Bebbington and value his contribution to scholarship join together to pay tribute to his outstanding work. Not only has he stimulated academic endeavour, he has also given much personal support, not least to those in the Baptist Historical Society and in Colleges, among them Spurgeon’s College and Baylor University (USA) where he is a Distinguished Visiting Professor. This volume reflects his wide involvements and the grateful esteem in which he is held. Among Professor Bebbington’s achievements has been both instituting and masterminding the very important International Conference on Baptist Studies (ICOBS), held every three years in different parts of the world. It is appropriate, then, that this volume was presented to him at the Seventh ICOBS Conference held in Manchester, July 2015.

In a feat of extraordinary archival research Sheila Rowbotham uncovers six little-known women and men whose lives were both dramatic and startlingly radical. Rowbotham tells a story that moves from Bristol, Belfast and Edinburgh to Massachusetts and the wildernesses of California, showing how rebellious ideas were formed and travelled across the Atlantic. Rebel Crossings offers fascinating perspectives on the historical interaction of feminism, socialism, anarchism and on the incipient consciousness of a new sense of self, so vital for women seeking emancipation. Their influences ranged from Unitarianism, High Church Anglicanism, and esoteric spirituality through to Walt Whitman, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Eleanor Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Benjamin Tucker, and Max Stirner. In differing ways they sought to combine the creation of a co-operative society with personal freedom, enhanced perception and loving friendships, experimenting with free love, rational dress, health diets and deep breathing. A work of significant originality in terms of historical scholarship, this book also speaks to the dilemmas of our own times.

In the last third of the eighteenth-century, Bristol and Nantes were two of the most active commercial ports of England and France, despite a slowdown of their economy. Their economies were based primarily on the maritime trade, but they developed alongside Atlantic industries that attracted many migrants, both male and female, from the surrounding countryside and from abroad. The busy urban environment, the high number of sailors and single men migrating to the port, and the decline of female house based proto-industries, were factors encouraging the development of prostitution. How prostitution is perceived in the context of social control and urban change is key to understanding the evolving attitudes to gender and sexuality in the eighteenth century. In this comparative study, Marion Pluskota offers an analysis of the lives of prostitutes that looks beyond a purely criminal perspective, and which encompasses their roles within their families, relationships and social networks. Using police and judicial records, she provides a valuable corrective to the narrow analysis of prostitutes in terms of immorality or deviance. The unique forms of development and problems faced by port cities in the early modern period make them particularly interesting subjects for comparative history. This book is well suited for those who study social history, gender and women’s history.

Considerable attention has recently been focused on the importance of social networks and business culture in reducing transaction costs, both in the pre-industrial period and during the nineteenth century. This book brings together twelve original contributions by scholars in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and North America which represent important and innovative research on this topic. They cover two broad themes. First, the role of business culture in determining commercial success, in particular the importance of familial, religious, ethnic and associational connections in the working lives of merchants and the impact of business practices on family life. Second, the wider institutional and political framework for business operations, in particular the relationship between the political economy of trade and the cultural world of merchants in an era of transition from personal to corporate structures. These key themes are developed in three separate sections, each with four contributions. They focus, in turn, on the role of culture in building and preserving businesses; the interplay between institutions, networks and power in determining commercial success or failure; and the significance of faith and the family in influencing business strategies and the direction of merchant enterprise. The wider historiographical context of the individual contributions is discussed in an extended introductory chapter which sets out the overall agenda of the book and provides a broader comparative framework for analysing the specific issues covered in each of the three sections. Taken together the collection offers an important addition to the available literature in this field and will attract a wide readership amongst business, cultural, maritime, economic, social and urban historians, as well as historical anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists whose research embraces a longer-term perspective.

In this collection, leading international scholars examine riots and protest in a range of countries and contexts, exploring the major social transformations of rioting and the changing dynamics, interpretation and potency of unrest in a globalised era.

Spanning the North Atlantic rim from Canada to Scotland, and from the Caribbean to the coast of West Africa, the British Atlantic world is deeply interconnected across its regions. In this groundbreaking study, thirteen leading scholars explore the idea of transatlanticism--or a shared "Atlantic world" experience--through the lens of architecture, built spaces, and landscapes in the British Atlantic from the seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. Examining town planning, churches, forts, merchants' stores, state houses, and farm houses, this collection shows how the powerful visual language of architecture and design allowed the people of this era to maintain common cultural experiences across different landscapes while still forming their individuality. By studying the interplay between physical construction and social themes that include identity, gender, taste, domesticity, politics, and race, the authors interpret material culture in a way that particularly emphasizes the people who built, occupied, and used the spaces and reflects the complex cultural exchanges between Britain and the New World.

A new interdisciplinary perspective on masculine identity and politics in Britain during the American War of Independence, 1775-83.

This is the first full-length study of Swansea’s urban development from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. It tells the little known story of how Swansea gained an unrivalled position of influence as an urban centre, which led it briefly to claim to be the ‘metropolis of Wales’, and how it then lost this status in the face of rapid urban development elsewhere in Wales. As such it provides an important new perspective on Welsh urban history in which the role of Cardiff, Merthyr Tydfil and even Bristol are better known as towns of influence in Welsh urban life. It also offers an analysis of how Swansea’s experience of urbanisation fits into the wider picture of British urban history.