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INTRODUCTION As the history of blockades over the years has shown, the success of any economic blockade depends, to a large extent, upon several key factors – factors that vary with the domestic resources and the geographic location of the nation that the blockade is directed against and the military resources at the disposal of the blockading power. First, “the economy of the blockaded power must be vulnerable” – given the resource and industrial base, a naval blockade directed against the United States, for example, would be almost certain to fail. Second, the blockading nation must have sufficient military power to have control of sea and land routes that connect the enemy with other nations; and, thus, enable it “to cut off the supply of goods to its enemy from outside his border.” Third, “the blockading power must be able,” either through military force or diplomatic pressure, “to secure the acquiescence or cooperation of neutral powers” that might be able to supply the blockaded country from overseas. In summary, then, economic warfare, to be successful, depends “on the ability to restrict an enemy's economy to a small and known stock of basic resources.” The blockade of Japan was successful because that country had been “driven back from her imperial outposts to the limited economic base of the Home Islands and Korea.” By the end of 1943, the United States and its allies had sufficient naval and air power to effectively enforce such a blockade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION World War I saw blockades assume a major role in the strategy adopted by both coalitions of belligerent powers. In some ways, this role merely reflected a continuation of the strategies adopted by the naval forces in earlier European conflicts; but by this time there was one crucial change in technology – the German military's expanded use of the submarine as a weapon of war. Because the submarine had not been a subject included in the earlier formulations of international law, and, as it posed a new set of military and moral problems, over the course of the war, new rules for international behavior were brought to the table, but, even in 1919, there was no satisfactory resolution. The submarine was crucial to the German war effort; but, ultimately, it did not accomplish as much as did the Allies' more traditional blockade. The submarine, nevertheless, did lead to a number of important strategic changes in the organization of, and the responses to, blockades; and it was instrumental in shaping policies that would become critical during World War II. Because Germany and, even more so, Britain, depended on imports for a significant portion of their food supply, the threat of blockades was an important consideration in the design of domestic policies. Problems with maintaining or increasing domestic production, as well as those arising from attempts to keep imports flowing, confronted both powers, as did issues involving the restriction of unnecessary consumption, if that latter goal was possible to achieve at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ECONOMIC WARFARE During a war there are a number of alternative military and naval strategies that a belligerent power can pursue in that country's efforts to defeat its enemies. Obviously, one such strategy is conquest by force of arms in direct combat. Such a strategy involves the siege or the invasion of an enemy's territory, and it is aimed at the destruction, capture, or surrender of the enemy's armed forces and, perhaps, the permanent occupation of its territory. Economic warfare, by weakening the enemy's ability to pursue military action, can substitute for or complement a strategy of direct combat. Such an economic strategy is designed to sever the trading links between the enemy and his allies or with neutral powers, and, in so doing, to reduce the level of military and civilian goods that are available to support his military ventures. Historically, the blockade, usually sea-based but occasionally land-based, has been the most common form of economic warfare; however, in the more recent past, other forms of economic warfare have been utilized. They include the imposition of higher tariffs, nontariff exclusions, restrictions on capital movements, and policies aimed at encouraging the production of substitutes by the targeting and neutral nations – all tactics designed to reduce enemy exports as well as their imports. In addition, the scope of direct economic warfare has been expanded to include the aerial bombardment of economic objectives, sanctions designed to restrict trade to neutral countries, sabotage of economic targets, preemptive purchases of strategic material, and, more generally, psychological warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because you see, that is what it is – magic, intoxication. Not ‘Love’ at all. While modernist fictions such as A Passage to India presented estranging accounts of Empire, other novels of the era defamiliarized the domestic realm as well. In truth, modernism treated these domains as more tightly intertwined than ever before. The close connection between colony and home was apparent in two familiar modernist narratives about how everyday existence in the twentieth century differed from that of the nineteenth century. One of those two stories is the oft-repeated supposition that the turn of the century saw the reversal of colonization. Such speculation appeared in coterie and popular fictions alike, and it characteristically involved the intrusion of matter from the far-flung colonies into the private recesses of the household. The other narrative appeared in an equally broad range of media and concerned the displacement of feminine sentimentality by female sexuality. Novels, psychological tracts, and economic essays described the undoing of heroines by new, unconscious, and largely misunderstood desires that could not help but embarrass and unsettle, even when animating and inspiring, the most composed of middle-class women. Given that modernist fiction linked these stories of nation and self analogically, it makes sense to read each in terms of the other. Indeed, I argue, they ought to be understood in that dependent relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Principles of Action What were the principles and rules of organization of the Soviet state from its inception? What were the concepts on the basis of which the economy was supposed to be reorganized and managed in order to transit toward “socialism”? How were production and distribution to be carried out, money and credit handled, wages and prices determined? To what extent would such changes reflect unalterable commitments to Marxian theories? Yet, why were some of the early principles eventually set aside, and then, later, reinstated as the guiding principles of the Soviet state? The policies in question concerning notably the alleged transition from capitalism to communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the specific pattern of organization of the socialist state and the economy that became central to Lenin's views and then to Soviet practice had been first enunciated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and then by certain German socialist theoreticians such as Karl Kautsky. Marx and Engels asserted in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 that the first steps in the communist revolution were “to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class.” The proletariat would then use its political supremacy to “wrest” all capital from the bourgeoisie and to “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state,” abolish private property on land, centralize credit and the means of transport and communications, and combine agriculture with manufacturing industry, gradually abolishing “the distinction between town and country.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural Policy The complex, tangled, ambivalent liberation of agriculture from its medieval shell in 1861 gave in time impetus to broader changes in agriculture, as well as in industry, transport, commerce, banking, and the government's receipts and expenditures. These changes were affected at times directly by clearly formulated governmental policies, at times indirectly and hesitantly by democratic policies evolved under circumstantial pressures domestic or foreign. I shall examine the character and scope of these policies in all the indicated sectors and conclude on their combined impact on the economy as a whole. The liberation of agriculture from certain medieval bounds involved historically three key elements: first, the emancipation of the serfs along with the abolition of variously defined feudal rights; second, the liberation of the ownership of land from certain legal restrictions and greater mobility regarding land transfers; and third, the partial release of agriculture from the ancient culture and usages of cultivation methods and land management. To what extent did the reform of 1861 and subsequent related measures actually help liberate agricultural labor through land ownership and offload ancient agricultural customs and methods? The reform of 1861 certainly aimed at recasting the Russian agrarian society on new bases, by creating a landowning peasantry and by buttressing the management of the land allotted and purchased by the peasants through the authority of the communes. Recall that the reform abolished the bondage rights of the gentry over the peasants' serfs settled on their estates as well as over the manorial servants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE CRITICAL ROLE OF AFRICAN PEOPLES in the evolution and operation of Atlantic markets and commerce from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century has been demonstrated in multiple ways in several of the preceding chapters. It has also been shown that the growth of English manufactured exports to Atlantic markets in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was largely responsible for increments in the sale of industrial products in England during the period and that the consequent expansion in the scale of industrial production provided the main source of pressure and opportunity for sustained technological and organizational development in manufacturing. This chapter continues the analysis by focusing on the specific mechanisms and channels through which access to Atlantic markets impacted the industrialization process in England from the midseventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. To demonstrate the extent to which the process was trade driven – in particular, trade centered in the Atlantic basin – the specifics of the import substitution cum re-export substitution industrialization (ISI plus RSI), mentioned in Chapter 2 are examined in detail, both in industry-wide terms and in terms of the major manufacturing sectors. For purposes of the issues central to the analysis in this study, made clear in the preceding chapters, included among the Atlantic markets to which England's manufacturers had access during the period are Western Africa, the Americas, and the Iberian peninsula (Portugal and Spain). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN THE MID-1950s Simon Kuznets, the Nobel prize economist, was requested by the United Nations to compare “the present situation in underdeveloped countries with the earlier situation of the more developed countries, with special reference to the factors that seem … to be critical in respect of potentialities of development.” Kuznets started his task with a rather long statement of the difficulty in chronologically identifying periods in the history of the economically advanced countries of the West during which their situation was comparable with that of the then underdeveloped countries. The difficulty was partly self-imposed by the initially chosen criterion for the comparison – a period in history during which the industrialized Western countries, were underdeveloped, i.e. lagged behind the then leading economies; when their backwardness relative to the leaders was as marked as that of the underdeveloped countries of today; when their per capita incomes were as low and material deprivation and misery were as widespread as in the latter. If so and if such an earlier situation were found, could we discern the strategic factors that produced the economic leadership of today? Kuznets recognized that for several centuries up to the fifteenth the Western economies “lagged behind most of the economies of the Near and Far East,” but considered the period too distant for him to handle competently. Ultimately, he settled for relative levels of industrial development, measured in terms of the ratios of the labor force employed in agriculture and industry, to determine the comparable situation for his task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AS IS WELL KNOWN, THE PRODUCTION of woollen cloth overwhelmingly dominated industrial production in England for several centuries. It was stated in Chapter 2 that raw wool export was to medieval England what crude oil export has been to Saudi Arabia in the modern world. The woollen industry thus developed initially as an import substitution industry on the basis of a domestically produced raw material. For as long as industrial production in England remained dominated by one product – woollen cloth – imported raw material was marginal to the growth and development of manufacturing in the country. Hence, English overseas trade in the early decades of the modern era was not seriously concerned with the supply of raw materials for industrial production in England. Manufactures for domestic consumption and tropical and Oriental products for re-export and domestic use dominated imports into England for many decades. This was to change gradually following the establishment of a wide range of import substitution industries in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as mentioned in Chapter 2. The growing importance of imported raw materials for the development of industrial production in England is reflected by the over time change in the structure of England's imports between 1699 and 1846: As these figures show, raw materials and foodstuffs were already about onethird of total imports, respectively, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the remaining one-third being made up of manufactures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE EVOLUTION OF FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS – comprising banking houses, discount houses, the stock exchange, and insurance houses – constituted an important part of the development of the English economy between 1650 and 1850. The combined operation of these institutions structured the credit economy in England during and after the Industrial Revolution. Their importance in the development process can be viewed from different angles. Being part of the service sector of the economy, their independent contribution to the growth of national income and employment over time can be examined in its own right. Crafts has estimated that government and defense, and housing and services contributed 27 percent of British national output in the eighteenth century, and 26 percent in the period 1801–31. C. H. Lee takes a broader view of the service sector to include trade, transport, insurance, banking, financial and business services, professional and scientific services, public administration, and defense – in short, the residual of the national income after taking out the contribution of agriculture, mining, industry, and construction. Under his broad conception of the service sector, Lee computes that the contribution of the respective sectors to the estimated overall employment growth rate of 1.73 percent per annum between 1755 and 1851 was 54.9 percent for industry (including manufacturing, mining, and construction), 22.0 percent for agriculture, 19.1 percent for services, and unclassified, 4.0 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE COURSE AND NATURE of the almost 800-year-long development process in England, which produced the structural and technological transformation controversially referred to as the Industrial Revolution, have been carefully laid out in the preceding chapter. The task now is to show how historians have explained the causes of this major historical event. Since the first systematic study by Arnold Toynbee in the 1880s, economic historians have periodically taken stock of the state of knowledge in the field. One of the earliest such exercise was by T. S. Ashton in 1937, in which we are informed that those who taught economic history before World War I “had but a meagre shelf from which to make up our story of the Industrial Revolution.” Between the wars the literature grew quickly. Ashton was, therefore, able to report excitedly, just before World War II, that the problem for students of the Industrial Revolution was “no longer a question of finding raiment to cover intellectual nakedness, but of which many garments to assume.” The literature on the subject has grown continuously since then. In 1965, Max Hartwell published the first “reasonably comprehensive and critical survey” of the various attempts by economic historians to explain the causes of the Industrial Revolution. The latter work presents a critical discussion of the different explanations favored by scholars. Since that publication, similar critical surveys of the literature on the causes of the Industrial Revolution have been published, the most recent and probably the most comprehensive being the one by Joel Mokyr. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WE HAVE SEEN IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS that the development process in England between 1650 and 1850 was strongly linked not just to British America but to all of the Americas. The supply of African slave labor – the central element in the development and operation of the Atlantic system during the period – constituted one of the linkages. The Portuguese had been buying and selling Africans for more than 100 years before the first known English attempt by John Hawkins to enter the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 1560s. Even at this point, the effort could not be sustained as the Spaniards and Portuguese strove to defend their monopoly of the more lucrative areas of Atlantic commerce. But, just as through war and diplomacy, British America came to dominate commodity production for Atlantic commerce from the eighteenth century, so did British traders in England and in the Americas come to dominate Atlantic commerce, including the supply of African slave labor to all the Americas. In this chapter we attempt to show the dimensions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade conducted by traders resident in England and, to a lesser extent, by those resident in British America. By showing the distribution of the British slave trade between British and non-British America, the evidence in the chapter is intended to reinforce the main argument of this study that the English economy during the period in question was linked significantly to activities in both British and non-British America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

STUDIES ATTEMPTING to explain the origin of the Industrial Revolution in England usually go no farther back than the late seventeenth century. There were a few attempts in the 1960s to take the story to the medieval period. A. R. Bridbury tried to demonstrate that the economic growth that led to the First Industrial Revolution can be traced to the late Middle Ages. In 1968 Sidney Pollard and David Crossley made such an attempt. Then in 1969, in a rather provocative paper, Max Hartwell invited historians to take a long-term view of the thousand years of English economic history that preceded the Industrial Revolution, in part, to mitigate the parochialism arising from, “the tendency of each historian to elevate his period, his growth factor, his depression or crisis, to a status of prime importance, either in the history of capitalism or of industrialization … ” More recently, in an intellectual effort covering more than 20 years and devoted to the development of an institutional theory of economic history and economic performance, Douglass North has traced the rise of the Western World from the era of the hunters and gatherers to the Industrial Revolution in England. North's central focus is to identify the critical long-term institutional changes that determined the direction of long-term economic change and performance, the central factors responsible for major institutional shifts over long periods of time, and the mechanisms by which change was effected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE EVIDENCE PRESENTED in the two preceding chapters makes it clear enough that the Industrial Revolution in England was the first example of trade-led economic development, and that the sources of trade expansion, or the “Commercial Revolution,” which propelled the process to higher grounds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were located in the Atlantic world. The task in this chapter is to show the factors that made possible the expansion of Atlantic commerce between 1500 and 1850. For this purpose, it is pertinent to examine the state of trade and production in the major regions of the Atlantic world in the middle decades of the fifteenth century before the establishment of regular seaborne contact across the Atlantic. This exercise helps to show the factors which operated to promote or constrain the growth of trade in the major regions of the Atlantic in the centuries preceding the development of multilateral trade across the Atlantic. It is argued that in the centuries or decades preceding the opening up of the Atlantic to regular seaborne commerce, the main constraint to the growth of production and consumption in the individual regions was limited opportunity to trade. In turn, limited opportunity to trade resulted from several factors – the range of resources in each region of the Atlantic; the level of development of the division of labor (local, regional, and international); inland transportation costs; and government trade policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PROBLEM IN THE LATE 1930s AND EARLY 1940s the contribution of African people to the economic development of parts of Western Europe featured in the work of four scholars of African descent in the Americas. In a book published in 1938, C. L. R. James made some brief remarks on the link between French industrial progress in the eighteenth century and the French American colony of Saint Domingo, modern Haiti: In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave-trade. It was an integral part of the economic life of the age, the greatest colony of the world, the pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation. The whole structure rested on the labour of half-a-million [African] slaves. He asserted that virtually all the industries that developed in France in the eighteenth century originated from the production of manufactures for the slave trade in Western Africa or for export to the French American colonies: “The capital from the slave trade fertilized them … ” Limited to a few pages, James did not pursue the subject in any detail. That was not the objective of his study. His book was intended to demonstrate that enslaved Africans in the Americas did not accept slavery passively. Confronted with all the instruments of physical and psychological violence at the disposal of the slaveholding class, they employed their mental and physical energy to resist slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been a renewed interest among historians in the early modern trade from India towards the West. Frank Perlin has even observed that recent findings in monetary history, documenting the continued importance of the flow of precious metals through the Near and Middle East to India in the seventeenth century, implied ‘important revisions to the now conventional position represented by Steensgaard’. By this Perlin presumably means that I should have taken the point of view that the success of the Companies not only brought to an end the direct caravan trade between Asia and Europe through the Levant, but also the export trade from India to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and along the caravan routes. As far as I remember, I never discussed this particular problem, but concerning the trade to Persia I wrote in 1973: ‘The expansion of the Company trade in the first decades of the seventeenth century undoubtedly reduced the transit trade through the Persian Gulf, but it did not stop it. Neither was the fall of Hormuz able to stop the transit trade to the densely populated Safavid and Ottoman Empires. It was with this smaller, though far from negligible, transit trade that the Persian trade acquired its greatest significance after the fall of Hormuz.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perils of nineteenth-century city life The quality of urban life has always played a key role in debates over the British industrial revolution. It certainly attracted the attention of Chadwick, Kay, and other social reformers in the 1830s and 1840s, but for hot rhetoric it is hard to beat Frederick Engels, who viewed the migration of rural labor to British cities as “social murder.” High density and resulting environmental decay both contributed to high city mortality and morbidity rates, and immigrants entered that environment at their peril. The early Victorian perception persists in academic debate even today, and the “pessimists” in the standard-of-living debate have made much of the issue. Although even the most ardent pessimist would acknowledge the dreary environment of rural England at this time, urban disamenities have, nonetheless, been viewed as seriously lowering working class living standards up to the 1840s and beyond. Not only was this true of old urban residents – whose cities, it was alleged, deteriorated in quality over time, but it was true of the new urban immigrants – who left more benign rural environments for employment in the ugly cities. What did the common laborer forego by leaving some Sweet Auburn for some ugly urban Sheffield during the First Industrial Revolution? Are quantitative answers to such questions possible? A. J. Taylor (1975, p. liv) certainly didn't think so when surveying the standard-of-living debate more than a decade ago: “How … can a just comparison be made between [that] which removal from a rural to urban environment entailed, and the social amenities which town and factory, however squalid, offered …?” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earlier in this study I argued against seeing the Renaissance playhouse as a marginal institution, suggesting that such a dichotomy misapprehends the fluidity of the market and the city, and overestimates the ideological difference of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. I posited, in its place, a material theater, a theater revolving around profit and closely connected with a dynamic market and the exigencies of urban life. A final objection to the idea of London as a stolid, unapproving entity whose Liberties are exploited by the playhouses might be lodged on the grounds that such a portrait engages the euphemistic sense of the phrase “taking liberties,” calling up a paradigm in which the City, here gendered male (cf. “City Fathers”), is cuckolded in the (female) suburbs and outskirts by lawless (male) players and playhouses. Although poets of the period frequently employed these gendered topographies – here one might point to Rosalind's remark on dwelling “in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat” (As You Like It 3.2.335–37), or any of the many examples of the topoi of a city's sack as “rape” (the city here gendered female) – such anthropomorphic depictions, I would suggest, can limit our critical understanding of real social situations. In segmenting different areas of the city, I want to argue, conceptualizations like this tend to exaggerate the differences between margin and center – differences which, significantly enough, scenes and characters in the plays often work to contradict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SLAVING'S economic contribution to the Atlantic system has proven a slippery beast, simultaneously of sensible significance but difficult to measure. Examination of the economics of slave trading on the scale of an “Atlantic system,” often mixed with the function of slavery in America, a closely related but analytically distinct economic sector, has until very recently focused narrowly on its direct contribution to the most dramatic and portentous development in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Atlantic economy: Britain's transition to industrial capitalism. Now, however, Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman have productively both broadened the range of economic effects relating slavery and slave trading to European growth and expanded the focus beyond the boundaries of separate imperial systems to explore the entire Atlantic system as an integrated economic unit extending from the banks of the Zambezi, Plate, and Mississippi – if not also the Indus – to the Bank of England. A paradoxical leitmotif that emerges from this recent work, if not a dominant theme, is that the economic significance of slavery and the slave trade lies not in their centrality to the course of British or European economic growth, where others have sought it and that they demonstrably lacked, but precisely in their marginality to the main currents of economic growth and development around the Atlantic. Slaving was marginal to the Atlantic economy in structural terms, in a sense not so much inconsistent with formal analysis of a fully market economy as one highlighting the institutional aspects of a mercantilist system fraught with monopoly, privilege, and other imperfections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE long and complicated historical relationship between slavery and capitalism is both elusive and unclear. This is true both in its initial phase and in its later development. As elsewhere in Europe, the Iberians had employed slaves in various social and economic situations long before the manifestation of what may be properly termed the advent of capitalism. Indeed, slavery formed an integral part of the social and organizational structure of society from distant antiquity. Capitalism, on the other hand, represented a relatively modern innovation in European societies, dating probably no earlier than the seventeenth century – with some understandable lag time for the Spanish and Portuguese states. Both slavery and capitalism, however, were essential characteristics of the new, dynamic imperialism that fueled the expansion of Europe after the fifteenth century. Although the connection between slavery and imperialistic capitalism may not have been either linear or direct, it is difficult to deny the catalytic function of the former for the latter. Expansion of slavery and the slave trade became an important instrument in the expansion of empire. Portugal and Spain did not initiate their overseas empires merely to derive economic benefits from slavery and the slave trade. Slave trading was not foremost in their plans. Nevertheless, economic pursuits constituted an integral component of the early restless expansion of these two Iberian states across the Atlantic and into the Indian and Pacific oceans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE inclusion of the New World in the international economy ranks among the important events in modern history. Slavery was the foundation of that inclusion in its early chapters, and slavery accounts for the growth and importance of the transatlantic trade. The chapters in this volume thus place the study of slavery in the mainstream of international history. Europeans brought 8 million black men and women out of Africa to the New World between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and slavery transformed the Atlantic into a complex trading area uniting North and South America, Europe, and Africa through the movement of men and women, goods, and capital. It was slavery that made the empty lands of the western hemisphere valuable producers of commodities and valuable markets for Europe and North America: What moved in the Atlantic in these centuries was predominantly slaves, the output of slaves, the inputs to slave societies, and the goods and services purchased with the earnings on slave products. To give just one example, by the late seventeenth century, the New England merchant, the Madeiran vintner, the Barbadian planter, the English manufacturer, the English slave trader, and the African slave trader were joined in an intricate web of interdependent economic activity. Slavery thus affected not only the countries of the slaves' origins and destinations but, equally, those countries that invested in, supplied, or consumed the products of the slave economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horse stealers were called ‘priggers of prancers’ and were well-established figures in the Tudor and Stuart underworld. According to Thomas Harman, writing in 1567, these men travelled the country dressed in jerkins of leather or white frieze, holding a little white wand in their hand. They lurked near pasture grounds looking for suitable horses and, if challenged, pretended to be lost. If this sounds as likely as robbers wearing masks and striped jerseys and carrying bags marked ‘swag’ the sources reveal that some thieves did fit this description. In 1647 a man seen walking near the place where a horse had been stolen at Beverley carried a whitish coloured staff, whilst another suspect in Shropshire in 1703 was dressed in a white close-bodied coat, a white waistcoat trimmed with black and a pair of buckskin breeches with silver buttons. In 1647 Edward Dowson, a soldier stationed at Kirk Stanley (W.R.Y.), stated that he had had a sorrel gelding stolen from the churchyard there and suspected Robert Ashworth of Rossendale (Lancs.) of the crime. He had been observed wandering about the town asking the way to Arkendale, Dowson averred, although he knew that he had not gone there. In 1700 a servant of Evan Gerard of Haighton (Lancs.) noticed two strangers lurking near his master's stable one evening and going up to them, was asked the way to Preston. When he went to the stable early the next morning, he found that two geldings were missing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND In his classic work on middlemen in English business in the period before the Industrial Revolution, R. B. Westerfield emphasises the importance of these people in bringing about the changes that occurred in marketing institutions at the time. In spite of its age, the book remains the best and fullest account of the subject, but unfortunately has surprisingly little to say on the activities of the horse dealers. In a brief survey, Westerfield confines himself to a few random notes on dealers and fairs and gives no indication of the specific functions that such men performed. In fact, whilst the trade exhibited a specific set of characteristics peculiar to itself, it also possessed elements to be found in other trades too. Westerfield writes of the distinction between wholesalers and retailers in internal trade, one set assembling and the other dispersing the wares, and creating patterns of movement towards the merchant and wholesaler on the one hand and towards the consumer on the other. In the internal horse trade there were certainly differences in the scale and scope of the activities of individual dealers but they cannot readily be divided along such lines as they fulfilled the functions of both collectors and distributors. In their dual role, horse dealers were similar to wool staplers in the sense that they sorted out horses into different categories, using quality, function, size, colour and pace as criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-agricultural production The Delhi sultanate lacks any description of its economic resources of the kind that Abū'l FaẒl supplies for the Mughal empire in his Ā'in-i Akbarī. Only a very incomplete sketch can, therefore, be offered of its mineral and craft production. Of salt, the cheapest mineral, the Sāmbhar lake formed a major source in northern India, so much so that the word namak (salt) was joined to its name. Quite surprisingly, in spite of the Salt range (‘Koh-i Jūd’) being frequently mentioned in our authorities, there is no description of the mines until Abū'l Fazl offers one c. 1595. Since, however, the mines are mentioned by Yuan Chwang, it is quite likely that they continued to be worked during the time of the sultans. Among the metals, iron ore of an exceptionally high grade was mined in India and was used to produce damascened steel which had a worldwide reputation. The mining areas lay scattered in the hilly region beginning with Gwalior and extending to the tip of southern India. The Cutch iron was probably responsible for the fame of the swords of Korij; and the Geniza records of the eleventh and twelfth centuries show that the Deccan exported iron and steel to the Middle East. But other mining localities can only be identified on the basis of the A'īn-i Akbari and our seventeenth-century sources. One may suppose that they were largely the same. Similarly, the Rajasthan mines probably yielded copper in the period of the sultanate, just as they did under the Mughals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]