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Abigail L. Swingen’s insightful study provides a new framework for understanding the origins of the British Empire while exploring how England’s original imperial designs influenced contemporary English politics and debates about labor, economy, and overseas trade. Focusing on the ideological connections between the growth of unfree labor in the English colonies, particularly the use of enslaved Africans, and the development of British imperialism during the early modern period, the author examines the overlapping, often competing agendas of planters, merchants, privateers, colonial officials, and imperial authorities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This significant reassessment of Jacobean political culture reveals how colonizing America transformed English civility in early seventeenth-century England. This title is also available as Open Access.
The British Industrial Revolution has long been seen as the spark for modern, global industrialization and sustained economic growth. Indeed the origins of economic history, as a discipline, lie in 19th-century European and North American attempts to understand the foundation of this process. In this book, William J. Ashworth questions some of the orthodoxies concerning the history of the industrial revolution and offers a deep and detailed reassessment of the subject that focuses on the State and its role in the development of key British manufactures. In particular, he explores the role of State regulation and protectionism in nurturing Britain's negligible early manufacturing base. Taking...
This book explores seventeenth-century English overseas expansion, offering a unique interpretation of the history of the early modern English Empire.
In early Victorian England there was intense interest in understanding the early Church as an inspiration for contemporary sanctity. This was manifested in a surge in archaeological inquiry and also in the construction of new churches using medieval models. Some Anglicans began to use a much more complicated form of ritual involving vestments, candles, and incense. This "Anglo-Catholic" movement was vehemently opposed by evangelicals and dissenters, who saw this as the vanguard of full-blown "popery." The disputed buildings, objects, and art works were regarded by one side as idolatrous and by the other as sacred and beautiful expressions of devotion. Dominic Janes seeks to understand the fi...
Was the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty of Brunswick to the throne of Britain and its empire in 1714 merely the final act in the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688-89? Many contemporaries and later historians thought so, explaining the succession in the same terms as the earlier revolution - deliverance from the national perils of 'popery and arbitrary government'. By contrast, this book argues that the picture is much more complicated than straightforward continuity between 1688-89 and 1714. Emphasizing the plurality of post-Revolutionary developments, it explores early eighteenth-century Britain in light of the social, political, economic, religious and cultural transformations inaugurated ...
The first slaves imported to America did not see themselves as "African" but rather as Temne, Igbo, or Yoruban. In Becoming African in America, James Sidbury reveals how an African identity emerged in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tracing the development of "African" from a degrading term connoting savage people to a word that was a source of pride and unity for the diverse victims of the Atlantic slave trade. In this wide-ranging work, Sidbury first examines the work of black writers--such as Ignatius Sancho in England and Phillis Wheatley in America--who created a narrative of African identity that took its meaning from the diaspora, a narrative that began with enslavement an...
This 2000 book addresses the discrepancy between the developing economy of England and the stagnant legal framework of business organization between 1720 and 1844.
How did the creation of an overseas empire change politics in England itself? After 1660, English governments aimed to convert scattered overseas dominions into a coordinated territorial power base. Stuart monarchs encouraged schemes for expansion in America, Africa, and Asia, tightened control over existing territories, and endorsed systems of slave labor to boost colonial prosperity. But English power was precarious, and colonial designs were subject to regular defeats and failed experimentation. Recovering from recent Civil Wars at home, England itself was shaken by unrest and upheaval through the later seventeenth century. Colonial policies emerged from a kingdom riven with inner tension...
Examines the efforts to bring political order to the English empire through projects of environmental improvement When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. By initiating ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both pl...