You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1853.
This book deals sequentially with major impediments to economic growth and their slow dissolution. It is original and quite different from standard economic history, which has always sought for one prime mover of the industrial revolution after another. These supposed positive forces are usually depicted as novel and little reference is made to inertia. Instead the barriers dealt with here run, in the first section, from early misallocations of resources to nineteenth-century reforms which of their nature indicate the problems to be overcome. The second section deals with more physical impediments and shocks, such as floods and settlement fires. These too are ignored in ordinary treatments, which this book will supplement or even replace. It will be of interest to academic economic historians and practitioners of neighbouring subjects such as economists, historians, historical geographers, and of course their students.