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A world of words, tail foremost, where Right – wrong – false – true – and foul – and fair As in a lottery-wheel are shook. In evidence given to the Parliamentary Committee on the Laws relating to Lotteries on 7 April 1808, the lottery-office entrepreneur and indefatigable self-publicist Thomas Bish declared that ‘Publicity to a Lottery is certainly necessary’. This chapter addresses that publicity, focusing most particularly upon a fascinating but little-known moment in English social history: the final draw of the English State Lottery, which was held in October 1826. It also pays much attention to Bish himself, as the figure most associated with the lottery in the minds of the contemporary English public. The proprietor of lottery offices at Cornhill, Charing Cross and in several provincial cities, Bish became a figure of some fame and notoriety in the early part of the nineteenth century on account of his striking lottery puffs. Here I examine his promotional methods, contextualise them against the background of the increasing middle-class disapproval of lotteries which led to their eventual abolition, and discuss the satirical response to the abolition of the lottery, to Thomas Bish, and to the final draw – the ‘Last, the downright Last’ as S. T. Coleridge called it, a body of work to which such important Romantic period figures as Charles Lamb and Thomas Hood made significant contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kinship relationships are not conceptualised as given. Biological relatedness merely creates the potentiality for kinship qualitatively defined. Consequently, claims to kinship and the quality of the content of relationships with kin are potentially negotiable in the public fora where kinship is performatively constituted through ritual and exchange. Decades of migration mean that those to whom a person is related (walongu) are widely dispersed throughout the country. Beyond the idiomatic kinship that characterises neighbourly sociality, the formalisation of kinship relations and their association with specific locales is now a transient artefact of life-crisis rituals. Kinship is dramatised at events associated with marriage and at funerals, where relationships are displayed by such actions as shaving, marking the faces of the relatives of the deceased with flour, the transaction of token payments and the inheritance of property and names. Participation matters, as ‘evidence of kinship’ (Wilson 1957: 200). Payments at funerals and those that make up the marriage process are transacted in cash and are thus highly divisible among those who can present a claim to receiving a portion of them. The sum of money a person receives is less important than the fact that by receiving it they have a legitimate claim to the relationship which receiving a portion of the payment implies. Actual sums obtained by those at the margins of kinship transactions are so small as to be of little economic significance, even to poor households. The value of relationship, however, cannot be overstated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successive post-missionary ecclesiastical regimes in the diocese have continued to emphasise the importance of sustaining a clear break between what is categorised as Christianity and non-Christian practice, a situation mirrored by clergy in other post-mission contexts in Africa and Asia (Mosse 1996; Stirrat 1992; Bond 1987; Wijsen 1993). The result, at least in Ulanga's Catholic communities, has been a perpetuation of practices that the Church defines as non-Christian outside the boundaries of the Church. This separation between church defined Christianity and apparently ‘un-Christian’ practice is not manifested in a separation between Christians and non Christians, but in the lives and practice of people who, while they define themselves as Christian, continue to perform what is classified by the Church as ‘un-Christian’. The majority of such practice concerns the relations between predecessors and descendants and is glossed in some contexts as belonging to the category of tradition or custom (kimila/jadi) (Green 1994). Practice defined as ‘traditional’ is not unchanging (cf. Boyer 1990). It can incorporate change as long as change is initiated on the authority of the dead and the spirits associated with the specific territories in which Pogoro people reside, facilitating the inclusion of distinctly Christian elements into contemporary strategies for maintaining relationships with ancestors. Masses for the dead have come to be regarded by some families as equivalents to offerings of beer and food to remember the dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with Independence and the end of colonial rule the 1960s saw the official end of the missionary era in much of Africa, including Tanzania, and the formal transfer of power to a new generation of African clergy. Not so much in anticipation of this as the perceived need for more priests as their Christian communities expanded the Capuchins had begun to train local men for ordination relatively early. The first priest from within the diocese was ordained in 1948, but it was not until the late 1970s that over 75 per cent of priests working in the diocese were Tanzanian. Prior to 1960 a mere five indigenous clergy had been ordained. Ordinations increased in the 1960s and 1970s, with a further twenty-eight ordinations. In 1988 the staff of the diocese comprised forty-one indigenous priests and nine missionary fathers, not all of whom were in residence. A decade later the diocese had a mere five Capuchin priests, two mission brothers and two mission sisters, as opposed to fifty-eight diocesan priests, four indigenous Capuchin priests, three indigenous brothers and two hundred and fifteen Diocesan sisters of St Francis of Assisi. On the face of it the Church in Mahenge is no longer a missionary church. This is not in fact the case. The diocese remains heavily dependent on external funds and, at least up to the early 1990s, received the bulk of this either from or through the missionary orders which were the agents of evangelisation in the diocese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-colonial continuities Perhaps contrary to initial expectations, there was no immediate break between pre and post-Independence Tanganyika, at least from the perspective of the rural dweller who found that life remained pretty much the same. National policy in the post-independence period merely accentuated colonial techniques for the marginalisation of the south. The tanu regime strove to institutionalise and embed party power across all tiers of Tanzanian society, sometimes by forced nationalisation and confrontation, sometimes by stealth. The result was the gradual conversion of state and economy to an extension of the party machine (Mlimuka and Kabudi 1986; Moore 1988). The aim was to establish new power relations based on a party definition of political legitimacy while eclipsing, if not eliminating, pre-existing positions of political authority. The impacts of these changes were variable. In some districts apparently ‘pre-colonial’ positions of ‘traditional’ authority, in actuality the creations of indirect rule, sustained themselves for a time in parallel to the reformed system (Abrahams 1981: 38; Thiele 1984: 60). Elsewhere, individual holders of power shrewdly strove to build convergence between pre and post-colonial positions through strategic manipulation of the blurred interface between state, party and local level political regimes. Of course, political authority never rested solely with government servants, whether they were chiefs, headmen or representatives of the political party. Power and authority were, and are, fragmented and related to the material and symbolic resources which a person actually had under their control (Lonsdale 1986). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical geographies The historical geography of governance in Tanzania fostered the emergence of administrative ethnicities as artefacts of imperial modernity. New relationships between people and places generated by this process were to have implications for the direction of large-scale shifts in religious affiliation in the twentieth century as European missionary orders gained initial rights, and eventual monopolies, in the pursuit of evangelisation strategies in specific areas. The politicised situation of location is manifested in the historical constitution of contemporary cultural identities in Tanzania which continue to be bound up with particular locations, religious affiliations and cultural practices. These processes are clearly evident in the histories of the district of Ulanga and of the Roman Catholic diocese once coterminous with, and now exceeding, its boundaries. In Ulanga, and to an extent outside it, formal affiliation to the Roman Catholic Church is associated with a particular ethnic identity, just as the district, like other ‘out of the way’ (cf. Tsing 1993: 8–49) districts, is associated in national popular culture with a lack of ‘development’ (Green 2000a) and is popularly perceived as being so divorced from contemporary political and economic realities as to be legitimately, if jokingly, more properly considered part of Tanganyika – the pre-independence polity. The district's majority ethnic group, probably numbering around ninety thousand, are people who define themselves, through adherence to a specific language and body of custom (mila na desturi) as Pogoro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial civilisation and the adoption of Christianity The majority of the world's Christians no longer live in Europe or north America but in the countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa south of the Sahara. Christianities of one sort or another are taken for granted aspects of the lives of billions of people in diverse communities that retain collective memories of non-Christian traditions and, frequently, continue to perform practices associated with them. The present constitution of different local Christianities is highly varied, reflecting in part the different forms and context of its promotion, adoption and ongoing transformation in and through practice. While these Christianities may appear to have very little in common beyond a belief in Jesus Christ they share to an extent a common origin and history. What informed and facilitated the remarkable and comparatively recent globalisation of Christianity was colonialism in its myriad forms (Hefner 1993, Burridge 1991). Colonial conquest created the preconditions for the kinds of political and economic contexts with which foreign missionaries could engage relatively unchallenged. Colonial governance formalised specific niches for missionary action that complemented the evangelisation endeavour. Of course, neither colonialism nor missionary evangelisations were unitary projects in any simple sense (Thomas 1994). However, affinities in goal and purpose fostered a synergy that was to enhance the expansionist capabilities of both. Colonialism is essentially concerned with the establishment and consolidation of control over subject populations through their transformation (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 235). The aims of evangelical mission were similar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The social history of insanity has proved a seductive paradigm for students of the management of the dependent poor in nineteenth-century England. The insane have been perceived as ‘casualties’ of class and gender power relations during the transformation from a paternalistic rural economy into an industrialized capitalist state. While the Elizabethan Poor Law legislation of 1601 was the administrative foundation on which the system of care was constructed, until recently two other themes dominated the historiography of mental disorder: first, that of the rise of psychiatry and psychiatrists; and second, the expansion of the Victorian asylum as society's preferred response. A reappraisal of the ‘revisionist’ interpretation of events is now underway, however, and a more complex picture is emerging. Mad paupers are no longer so readily annexed to political dogma. Scull's ‘deeply researched and provocative account of the growth of public asylums’ in nineteenth-century England, published as Museums of Madness in 1979, attributed the expansion of ‘asylumdom’ to the emerging commercial market economy and the consequent extrusion of inconvenient non-working people from the mainstream of family and community life. Scull interpreted the growing interest in madness by specialist mad-doctors as an unattractive bid for power and status by a group of financially insecure members of a profession still on the threshold of respectability. Looking back twenty years later, Scull acknowledged that his work was stimulated in part by Foucault's brilliant but flawed essays on power relations, Madness and Civilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent article Shula Marks has asked, what is colonial about colonial medicine? The answer, of course, depends in part on what one considers ‘colonial’ to mean. One of the benefits – perhaps unexpected – of the growth of studies of colonial medical institutions in recent years has been a growing appreciation of the diversity of colonial contexts, the recognition that colonialism was not the same in all places. This chapter seeks to contribute to that understanding by posing the question, what was distinctively colonial about the confinement of the insane in Nigeria, with an emphasis on institutions in the southwest of the country? The history of Nigeria's asylums re-enacted developments common in the comparative history of psychiatric institutions, but also illustrates themes peculiar to the politics and priorities of colonialism. In the beginning, the institutions were, like many colonial imports, already obsolete by metropolitan standards, replicating many of the faults British psychiatry had come to pride itself on overcoming. For most of the early twentieth century, colonial officials in Nigeria lamented the state of the asylums and planned fitfully to reform them. But when reform was achieved in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was contemporary with Nigeria's gradual shift to independence, and the reform was largely accomplished through the initiatives of Nigerians. Victorian Britain enacted a series of dramatic changes in lunacy policy, including increased institutionalization, the rise of ‘moral treatment’ and other optimistic therapies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction In 1933, Gustav Blume, a psychiatrist at the Wittenauer Heilstätten Asylum in Berlin, wrote: It is no secret to say that reading psychiatric case reports is not an unspoiled pleasure. Often it is a hopeless torture! I am not talking about the content of the reports, but about the technical process of reading them. For example, you have to work out a case history of an old schizophrenic, which covers some 20 to 30 years and more than a dozen stays in different hospitals. You sit worried in front of a chaotic package of more or less faded, damaged, and mostly loose sheets of paper from which stacks of illegible and crumpled letters and papers emerge. You try unsuccessfully to find out where the case history begins, where the most recent entries can be found; you reorganise, sort, and take notes. You dig deep into the scientist's last reserves of courage and dive into the stormy sea of faded or fresh hand-written psychiatrists' notes, and – you finally collapse. You then despair (or become enraged, depending on your temperament) of decoding your colleagues' notes and you are driven over the precipice to complete frustration. To document a case history by handwriting required a slower pace of life compared with today. To then read these old-fashioned entries, however, is impossible for the modern rational man in a time of portable typewriters. He refuses to do this as an enormous waste of time and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The closing decades of the twentieth century brought a rising and sustained critique of the welfare institutions of the modern state – one largely left-wing in origins but increasingly taken over and voiced by the radical right. Professions which professed to be ‘enabling’ were, claimed a rising chorus of critics, ‘disabling’. Social services which presented themselves as benign were, in reality, ‘insidious’, serving the interests of providers not consumers, promoting professional dominance, policing deviance and intensifying the social control required to ensure the smooth running of multinational capitalist corporations – or, in the right-wing version, such institutions were wasting tax-payers' money on scroungers and so encouraging malingering. Unsurprisingly, such political critiques of ‘welfarism’ (in its widest sense) spawned histories of their own. Replacing various kinds of Fabian, ‘Whig’ or celebratory historical interpretations which had treated the emergence of the ‘caring professions’ and social-security institutions as beneficial and progressive – as shifts from neglect to administrative attention, from cruelty to care, and from ignorance to expertise – a new brand of studies took altogether a more negative or jaundiced view of such social institutions and policies, and sought to blow their benevolent ideological cover. In no field were the new and critical histories more critical, indeed more indignantly impassioned, than the history of psychiatry. Traditional ‘in-house’ and Whig histories of the care of the insane had never been particularly triumphalist – after all, psychiatry had always been a house divided against itself, uneasy in its stance towards both the public and the medical profession at large, and aware of its embarrassing want of ‘magic bullets’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This chapter provides a selective review of nine skeletal and dental lesions that have been used to construct the skeletal database employed in the development of the health index. These lesions are described within a biosocial framework. Change in length of subadult long bones can identify differences in nutrition and health. Linear enamel hypoplasias provide information on the severity and temporal pattern of stress during infancy and childhood. Porotic hyperostosis is a lesion of the skull associated with iron deficiency. Bony responses to bacterial infections are associated with differences in contact with bacteria and the levels of resistance. Patterns of healed fractures indicate activities that include livingon difficult terrain, hazardous occupations, and the extent of warfare and interpersonal violence. Osteoarthritis indicates the degree of regular strenuous activity and quality of life. Dental decay and tooth loss have functional significance for nutritional status. INTRODUCTION AND PURPOSE Analyses of skeletal remains are providing a unique window onto patterns of health in past human populations. Until very recently the surviving human tissues, most often bones and teeth (and less often skin, hair, and fluids, such as blood), have usually been ignored in historical and prehistoric research, or at best, their analysis was relegated to appendixes of archaeological site reports (Buikstra, 1991). However, archaeologists and historians have begun to realize that human remains are the most direct means for assessment of past biologies and how these biologies interacted with social, political, and economic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The economic record establishes the midnineteenth century as a time of prosperity according to growth in incomes, wealth per capita, and technology. Less is known about the record on health, and that which is available suggests that improvements in the quality of life did not extend to mortality rates and morbidity levels. The population investigated here consists of almost 600 skeletons out of more than 1,500 individuals buried at St. Thomas' Anglican Church cemetery in Belleville, Ontario, between 1821 and 1874. Our investigations show that mortality rates, especially for infants, did not improve over the period of greatest cemetery use, from 1850 to 1874. Skeletal investigations support the interpretation of the importance of acute versus chronic infections and the significance of environmental conditions affecting infant morbidity and mortality. The skeletal variables identified as significant contributors to the quality of life index for St. Thomas' may fit with the conclusion that healthwise, life in the mid-nineteenth century was not measurably better for the middle to upper class at St. Thomas' and may coincidentally reflect a broader North American phenomenon related to urbanization. Nevertheless, these observations are also uniquely reflective of the church and town alone. INTRODUCTION Historians and other social scientists have been interested in the fate of various classes or socioeconomic groups during the transition from a settled agricultural to an urban-industrial way of life, a change that occurred in North America during the middle of the nineteenth century. The economic record clearly establishes the midnineteenth century as a time of prosperity according to growth in incomes, wealth per capita, and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This chapter describes the data used for the Western Hemisphere project, discusses the format in which the information was coded, and explains the health index, which is a method for measuring and comparing health status using skeletal remains. Skeletal lesions measure primarily chronic health conditions, but they can reflect acute infections to the extent that they affect physical growth, the formation of linear enamel hypoplasias, and other conditions that register on bones. The database contains measurements of seven basic health indicators from12,520 skeletons of people who lived in North, Central, or South America over the past 7 millennia. For purposes of analysis, many of the 218 sites where people lived were combined into 65 sites based on ecological and chronological similarity. The health index adjusts for the age distribution of the population and incorporates the severity of lesions indicating biological stress. The current (Mark I) version of the index gives equal weight to the health indicators, but this assumption and others explained in the chapter could be modified based on additional research. The Mark I health index could also be readily adapted to incorporate length of life. The index rankings reveal considerable diversity in health status, with Native Americans being among the most but also among the least healthy groups who lived in the Western Hemisphere prior to the end of the nineteenth century. Social scientists have devised many approaches to measuring the standard of living. Economists use national income accounts and related measures, such as gross national product per capita, to depict material aspects of the quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provoked by the French charge that there was ‘never a good town in England, only London’, the English herald in the Debate of the Heralds of 1549 was moved to respond at length: ‘I pray you, what is Berwick, Carlisle, Durham, York, Newcastle, Hull, Northampton, Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Coventry, Lichfield, Exeter, Bristol, Salisbury, Southampton, Worcester, Shrewsbury, Canterbury, Chichester?’ All these, and more, ‘if they were in France, should be called good towns’. The herald's list of twenty towns embraces between a third and a half of the fifty or so regional centres and major county towns of England which – with their equivalents in Scotland and Wales – are the subject of this chapter. It also contains fourteen – almost one half – of the thirty-one largest English provincialm towns in the early sixteenth century, which are enumerated in Table 11.1 below. It is evident from the other six towns nominated by the herald, however, that size of population was not the only criterion for entry in his list. Lichfield, Chichester, Durham and Carlisle were there because, like others, they were cathedral cities, Hull because it was another important port, Berwick as a vital frontier citadel. Without some of these, moreover, the thinly populated North of England would scarcely have been represented at all. Status and function were as important as size in defining good towns. The same applied to ‘great towns’, the other conceptual category which contemporaries applied to the upper reaches of the urban hierarchy, though in this case size came more deliberately into the frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Were the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the first to define, for British people, ‘the urban experience’? In broad terms, the answer to this would have to be in the negative, since the pattern of major towns, at least in England and Scotland, was already long-established, and the sixteenth century's increase in population can be seen as a phase of recovery as much as of expansion. On the other hand, it is in this period that London emerges as a European metropolis and as England's capital city, that urbanisation becomes linked with national identity and centralised government, and that the proportion of those resident in towns, or sharing in the experience of towns in some phase of life, begins to accelerate. In this chapter, urbanisation will first be examined in demographic terms, with reference to migration, fertility, marriage and mortality, especially in relation to subsistence and the shift from epidemic to endemic causes of death. The second section explores contemporary sensibilities and social structure as affected by changes in the pattern of disease and in the urban environment, touching on gender, work and poverty, and contemporary ideas about population, crowding and urban life. By ‘environment’ we mean, in particular, factors affecting townspeople's sense of the presence of others. The final section analyses the ambivalent character of two staple sources of reassurance, household and neighbourhood, which provided continuity but which can be shown to be open to challenge and renegotiation from within and without as urban pressures intensified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographical and geological setting The history of urbanisation in Scotland is predetermined by the geography and geology of northern Britain. Often assumed to be a country of sharp divide between Highland and Lowland, its physical nature, however, is more complex. It was not merely the mountainous areas of the Highlands that were seemingly unapproachable from the more gentle Lowland terrain; but the south-west regions of Galloway and Ayrshire were equally divorced from the east coast; and the southern border region of the country, in its very lack of natural, physical definition, often had a somewhat different agenda from the other parts of Scotland. Even a cursory glance at the west coast of northern Britain, from Lancashire to the northern Highlands of Scotland, reveals the linkages that were to dominate this seaboard. Travel by water was to form the easiest method of contact for the western Highlands, Islands, Galloway and Ayrshire; and the predominant communication points and influences for these areas were to be not the Lowland basin centred around the River Forth, but Ireland and the North of England. The east coast, by contrast, used the sea to look to mainland Europe, and in particular northern France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and the Baltic. They were more approachable, in terms of both ease and time of travelling, than the less accessible parts of Scotland. Rivers, such as the Tweed, the Forth, the Tay and the Dee, all providing natural harbours, would become the foci for this contact. Perth and Stirling, at the highest navigable points of the Rivers Tay and Forth respectively, were to play crucial roles in Scotland's history; and Berwick, Dundee and Aberdeen, with their good harbourage, were to dominate the economic scene; but increasingly under the hegemony of Edinburgh through its pre-eminent port of Leith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Midland region contains unspectacular countryside, except at its western and northern margins, and varied geology. The dominating features of its geography are three of the major drainage basins of England: the Severn, the Trent and the Ouse/Nene/Welland (Map 22.9). These river systems gave shape to sub-regions, provided easy transport routes to other parts of the country and ensured the prosperity of towns located on their banks and crossing places. The West Midlands is focused on the Severn, Warwickshire Avon, Wye and Teme valleys, whilst the Wiltshire Avon and the upper Thames form its southern bounds. The shire towns (except Stafford) were all located beside these rivers (Map 4.1). So, too, was the entrepôt trading centre of Bristol which became the largest city of the region since it was able to serve a large part of the South-West too. The Severn was navigable to Welshpool on the Welsh border. In contrast, the Trent was navigable only a few miles upstream from Nottingham, which is the only shire town located beside it, though Stafford, Leicester and Derby are on tributaries. The entrepôt of the Trent valley is Hull, which served the whole Yorkshire Ouse basin of the North of England too. The rivers draining the South-East Midlands reached the North Sea via the fenlands and their successful navigation depended on constant maintenance. Boston and Lynn were the major port towns, but the shire towns are also located on the principal rivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numbers and location of small towns A first stage in understanding late medieval small towns must be to ask how many there were, and where they were located. But how do we recognise the small towns among the thousands of rural settlements? Those places can be identified which enjoyed the status of boroughs (in England and Wales) and burghs in Scotland. But that can only initiate the inquiry, because we know that many small boroughs and burghs existed only in law and never developed into urban settlements. Other places, especially in eastern England, became towns without gaining the privileges of a borough. The clerks used the word ‘vill’ to describe both rural and urban places, and in doing so echoed common speech, in which a wide range of settlements were called ‘towns’. Without clear guidance from contemporary terminology, we must apply our definition of a town, searching for evidence of a compact and permanent settlement, in which a high proportion of the inhabitants pursued a variety of nonagricultural occupations. In addition, we might hope to find that the town served as the commercial, administrative or religious centre of its locality, and that it had the topographical characteristics of closely set houses, narrow plots and a market place. Small towns are defined here arbitrarily as containing fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Places have accordingly been excluded if they are found to exceed that figure at any time in the period, but some of them did not remain consistently large. No lower limit has been imposed, though we would expect that most towns would be larger than the surrounding villages, and in practice the great majority of small towns had populations in excess of 300. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: points of perspective In 1314 the spire of St Paul's Cathedral in London was damaged by a lightning bolt. The repairs accomplished, a man clambered carefully to the scaffold's summit and replaced the great cross, charged with its precious contents of relics which included a fragment of the cross of Christ. From up here, one commanded a panorama of the city. The square mile of the walled area, and the straggling suburbs to east and west and to the south of the River Thames, were all displayed to view. The urban vista was punctuated by the towers of a hundred parish churches and a score of convents, whose smaller scale expressed, from the perspective of the cross of Paul's, their subordinate and ancillary status. Order was additionally revealed in a network of streets still marked by a grid plan imposed four centuries before by an Anglo-Saxon king. From this vantage point the city appeared entire, comprehensible and available for possession. When, in the sixteenth century, the first urban mapmakers were encouraged by municipal councils to publish such another panoptic vision of the city, they made the same climb in order to construct from steeple-tops the impression, before the possibility of human flight, of the bird's-eye, all-encompassing view. Bishop, monarch and magistrate each conceived of the city as a visible entity, conveniently subject to his direction and control. But how many shared the universal vision of Paul's cross? Far below, the teeming alleys and tenements of early fourteenth-century London housed 80,000 individuals, hardly one of whom would ever see the city in this light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The information relating to the standard of living in the Deccan and Maharashtra is scarce and fragmentary. On the basis of such unsatisfactory data, a sketchy account is given below of the rural people, the urban residents and government servants. Rural people As was pointed out in chapter IX, there was a considerable economic differentiation among the peasantry in the medieval Deccan. The small peasants who held the land below 10 acres or so as well as the village artisans and servants may be regarded as the rural poor. Though the living conditions of the small peasants of the time is little known, there is hardly any doubt that the ordinary rural folk used to live in mud huts thatched with straw. They seem to have worn fewer clothes than they do now, possibly due to the simpler habit of the age. When the village artisans and servants collectively called twelve balutedārs were given their balute-payment in cash instead of in kind, the annual amount was Rs. 10 each to carpenter, leather-worker, rope-maker, and mahār (an untouchable caste of watchman and other menial workers), Rs. 5 each to blacksmith, potter, barber, and washerman, and Rs. 2½ each to goldsmith, astrologer, Hindu temple-keeper, and Masjid-keeper in a western Deccan village towards the end of the eighteenth century. At any rate, these cash payments were remarkably small in amount as compared with urban wages to be mentioned later. Moreover, it should be noted that the balute-payment was not made to each family of balutedārs but to each watan, so that if there were several families sharing a watan, they had to divide the money among themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems This study began ten years ago as a history of rural society in the age of the German Reformation. At that time scholars knew that the majority of the population lived and worked in the countryside, that the village formed the foundation, the cornerstone, of ecclesiastical and secular power, and that the Peasants' War had played a decisive role in shaping the course of the early Reformation. The old view of Leopold von Ranke no longer rang true. To him German villagers exploded onto the scene of the Reformation with the fury of a storm; but they then vanished, as does every storm, within a short time. What had vanished from the history of the Reformation was not the peasantry, however, but Ranke's interest in it. Yet, despite the attention paid the Peasants' War in the mid–1970s and the earlier pioneering work of Wilhelm Abel on the agrarian cycle, little was known of how villagers came to terms with the wrenching changes of the “long sixteenth century” in the German countryside. And these changes had only just begun to be felt in 1525. This strange neglect of the history of the German peasantry after 1525 was a symptom of a deeper problem. Astonishingly little attention had been paid to German social history as a whole in the early modern period. The historical literature on early modern German history at that time resembled a painting of Caravaggio, Titian, or even Goya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If it is true, as has been suggested, that even John Locke began with his conclusions, then worked out arguments to support them, it would not be surprising if lesser thinkers did the same. The fact that some of Filmer's theories had been refuted by Locke, and some of Locke's by Hume, was irrelevant to men who sought philosophical arguments to support their political convictions. The reasons men held the convictions they did depended more upon the intellectual and social experiences and backgrounds of individuals than any rigorous or logical thought. It is more likely to be explained by some process of intellectual prosopography than one of philosophical analysis. Yet part of any individual intellectual biography was the current intellectual climate, the bag and baggage of ideas. In this period, as in most others, few ideas in current popular use were new, though men were aware of the new way of thinking and questioning in Enlightenment France. The traditional British debate ranging between patriarchalist and contractarian justifications of government remained an important source from which arguments, supporting whatever prejudices a man held, could be selected. It is, finally, impossible to say how far such ideas influenced men's opinions and how far they merely reinforced existing convictions. What is certain is that their influence was neither precise, rigorous nor straightforward, for most men did not think in such ways. Yet, clearly, philosophical ideas did influence men's political thought in broad, general terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chronological boundaries of this book are largely arbitrary ones. It is not implied that there were seams in Clio's garment either in 1760 or in 1832. The changes that took place were significant, but gradual. The social arguments of the 1830s would have shocked no one in the 1760s, although the need to reiterate them so frequently, stridently and almost exclusively would have suggested a lack of confidence in the stability of society. The religious grounds of political obligation as advanced in 1760 would have been denied in the 1830s only by the most radical, although even to conservatives pragmatic or utilitarian arguments would have seemed safer than those based on abstract principles. Yet something momentous had happened. Coleridge, in 1816, asserted that ‘the epoch-forming Revolutions of the Christian world, the revolutions of religion, and with them the civil, social and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems’. Somewhat less portentously, J. G. A. Pocock suggests that the history of political thought ‘might be defined as a history of change in the employment of paradigms’; and, one might add, of change in the agenda of debate. Certainly, both the agenda and the paradigms most frequently used in 1832 were significantly different from those employed in 1760. Whether they can be regarded as belonging to a different metaphysical system is another question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study relates to literature in the four main areas of ecclesiastical, intellectual, political and social history. The classic works on the Church of England in the eighteenth century remain those of Norman Sykes which, rightly, did much to rehabilitate the Hanoverian church after the criticisms of earlier writers such as C. J. Abbey and J. H. Overton. But Sykes's sympathy with the latitudinarian and Erastian strains in the church led him to concentrate, intellectually, upon men like Hoadley and Watson, and on Warburton's theory of the alliance of church and state. Like many ecclesiastical historians, his interests were more constitutional, ecclesiological and pastoral than metaphysical and theoretical. This is true even of a man of the breadth of vision and understanding of G. F. A. Best, who has provided the definitive account of church-state relations from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and much else along the way. Sykes paid only limited attention to the last decade of the century; unfortunately, the best study of the Church of England in the 1790s, by Nancy Murray, remains unpublished. Murray also neglects theoretical arguments, but analyses the various parties in the church and the ideological and theological differences between them. She examines the high-church Hackney Phalanx, the orthodox bishops, the liberal Latitudinarians, and the Evangelicals. All these groups in the Church of England have had their historians, but the Evangelical movement has grabbed the lion's share of attention. A host of monographs, theses and articles examines the evangelical phenomenon from almost every angle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Revolution of 1688–9 established in England a brand of political philosophy which dominated Christian political and social theory for a century. The French Revolution brought about a change of emphasis in English clerical argument, a movement from abstract political philosophy to practical social theory. The repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts in 1828, the passing of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the First Reform Act of 1832 constituted the most significant group of constitutional reforms since the Revolution Settlement. To what extent were these changes in the constitution of church and state, which had been resisted by the established powers for so long, influenced by that fundamental change of emphasis in Christian political thought, and how far were they simply a response to the exigencies of practical politics? Did they presage a movement back to further consideration of the philosophical and theological foundations of the constitution, or were they a reflection of the new concentration on the need for social stability? Were religious, normative arguments used to justify the policy stances which were adopted, and if so were they employed by reformers, conservatives or both, or did the desire to maintain social order and stability lead statesmen and churchmen to justify their positions on grounds of expediency? Did arguments of principle or of utility predominate? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The link between blasphemy and sedition was real and occasioned genuine alarm. But government over-reaction should not lead us to exaggerate the extent of the connexion. As well as numerous conservative infidels, many radicals were men of religious conviction, as the career of John Cartwright illustrated. The complexity of the link between blasphemy, faith and political radicalism is perhaps best illustrated by the case of the bookseller and publisher, William Hone. The case study of Paley concerned a man who significantly changed the development of Christian thought. That of Horsley examined a typical figure of the establishment and demonstrated the unity and synthesis of the body of ideas in which a change of emphasis took place. This study of William Hone does neither of these things; instead it is offered as a cautionary tale. The analysis of the role of religion in political thought in the post-revolutionary period presented above may suggest a greater degree of polarisation than was the case. Chapter 13 examined the conflict between the Anglican and Dissenting churches to be the major agent of social control, while Chapter 14 looked at the links between blasphemy and sedition. This may appear to confirm the contemporary assumption of links between religion and repression on the one side, and of infidelity and revolution on the other. To a considerable extent those links did exist, but they should not be exaggerated. Because of his radical political views it was presumed at the time, and is still assumed by many historians, that William Hone was an infidel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for social control and the ability and propriety of religion to enforce it were widely agreed. This control was exercised largely through religious education and the teaching function of the pastoral ministry. How far were these primarily functions of the established church and how far could all denominations share in their application? The relative unanimity and closing of ranks which was apparent in the late 1790s, especially in the light of the conspiracy theory, was already disappearing by 1804, although the major battles between Anglicans and Dissenters on this issue came between 1810 and 1813, and some co-operation survived even these. Religion and education The British and Foreign Bible Society was formed in 1804. There had been a number of societies of similar intent and earlier date, but the 1804 society was unusual in that it was supported by both Anglicans and Dissenters. Evangelicals such as Granville Sharp, Zacary Macaulay, William Wilberforce and Lord Teignmouth were closely involved. In 1808–9 a number of local auxiliary Bible Societies were formed as off-shoots of the parent body. Because of the trans-denominational nature of its support the Society issued only the Bible, with no explanatory notes and without an accompanying Prayer Book. Meanwhile, popular education developed on denominational lines. In 1797 the Anglican Andrew Bell published an account of his Madras system of education, and in 1803 the Quaker Joseph Lancaster advocated the establishment of schools which taught an undenominational brand of Christianity which was, in practice, Dissenting. In 1811 the National Society was formed to set up Anglican schools based on Bell's system, and teaching the theology of the established church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The change in emphasis from political obligation to social order survived the French Revolution and was reflected in Christian political theory in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. The major crises of the period for churchmen continued to stimulate the evolution of a Christian theory of society which would ensure social stability and unity; this was forged in the heated controversies over the development of popular education, the infidel challenge, the post-war distress and disturbances, the assault on the privileges of the established church and the challenge of reform in church and state. Political theory General trends The episcopal sermons preached before the House of Lords in Westminster Abbey on Martyrdom Day were traditional occasions for an exposition of constitutional theory. However, these lapsed during the war and none were preached after that of 1795 until 1807, when they were revived at the request of George III. However, although annual sermons were preached from 1807 to 1810 the practice then lapsed again and was never revived. Of the four that were preached, those of Henry Bathurst in 1808 and William Mansel in 1810 were largely in the constitutional tradition of pre-war years. But Thomas Burgess's sermon in 1807 concentrated on the danger the French example posed to society and stressed the need for religious education, while Charles Moss in 1809 combined thoughts on the philosophic notion of political obligation with an awareness of the social role of religious restraints and sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christianity and government Conservative and radical Christians The widespread assumption that Christianity was a natural prop to government rested upon an interpretation of the faith which did not go unchallenged or undefended. On the most superficial level, there was some discussion of whether or not it was proper to introduce politics into the pulpit. Most agreed in practice that, whilst it was improper for their political opponents to do so, their own views were so quintessentially truthful they were not out of place. Burke argued that politics should be kept out of the pulpit if the preacher were a man like Richard Price; such a ‘confusion of duties’ benefited neither liberty, government nor religion. Like most establishment writers, he assumed that sermons defending the political and social status quo were acceptable, while those advocating change were not. Many radicals pointed out that political sermons from conservative clerics were traditional on Martyrdom Day and on fast days appointed by the king and ministers for political reasons; moreover, from 1793 the clergy had prayed for the success of the nation's fleets and armies against those of another political ideology. In 1793 the Vicar of Wellsbourn, J. H. Williams, complained that the clergy had become mere instruments of the secular government. The church was no more than an ‘engine of state’ valued and rewarded for its social usefulness. Conscience made a clergyman defend government in general, but ambition led him to support the policies of an administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samuel Horsley was the son of a lecturer at St Martin-in-the-Fields and the grandson of a principal of Edinburgh University. He was a student at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and a tutor at Christ Church, Oxford. An enthusiastic Greek scholar, he took pleasure in discussing a range of authors, especially Thucydides, with his son. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and a keen student of mathematics. From 1779 to 1785 he edited the works of Sir Isaac Newton, although it was later alleged that he overlooked, possibly destroyed, a ‘cart-load’ of papers on religious subjects which showed Newton to be Unitarian in faith. Horsley, a great trinitarian champion, probably regarded these as unfit for publication. He became Archdeacon of St Albans in 1781 and a prebendary of Gloucester in 1787. Horsley was an enthusiastic supporter of Pitt the Younger, to whom he owed his elevation to the episcopate in 1788 as Bishop of St David's. He spoke and voted for the government in the House of Lords and strongly supported Pitt's war effort and the need to finance it. He enjoyed some modest preferment, becoming Bishop of Rochester in 1793 and of St Asaph in 1802. He combined a staunch conservatism in both social and political concepts, with a genuine Christian faith and concern for the well-being of the church. He was perceptive enough to be aware of the exigencies of the changing situation and to make the necessary adjustments in the general tenor of his argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the arguments were not new, the French Revolution led the English increasingly to consider social theory and the religious base of their society. Religious arguments could be used both to validate the social order and to teach men in every class the duties necessary to maintain it. It could cement the unity of the community both in a local and in a national sense, and it could impose restraints and sanctions on unregenerate man and so order his social behaviour. The social hierarchy Edmund Burke was both the apostle and the prophet of social theory in this sense. Most in advance of his contemporaries was the centrality of the role of religion as a restraining and reconciling agent in society which he outlined in his Reflections. This concentration and emphasis was rarely found in other writers before 1793. Rather more of his contemporaries echoed his vision and defence of a divinely ordained social hierarchy which he produced in response to disputes in the Whig party in 1790–1 when he was anxious to establish that his interpretation, rather than that of Fox, was in the true Whig tradition. But this also did not become commonplace until 1793–4. Burke assumed that all except the Jacobins accepted that God gave men their station in society and that, being placed in that rank by divine not human will, they were intended to fulfil the role assigned them. He assumed that men consented to these social and civil obligations because they arose from the ‘predisposed order of things'. That order involved a complex, social and economic hierarchy which should not be queried, for to doubt it would be to question God's wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major themes The political philosophy which dominated Britain for a century before the outbreak of the French Revolution consisted of two major elements, both of which drew upon religious arguments for their validation. The first gave spiritual justification to political authority, any authority, the powers-thatbe; the second legitimised certain means of changing the form of government and explored the circumstances in which revolution was permissible. Only by maintaining a correct balance between these, so men believed, could they avoid either anarchy or despotism. Since it was widely agreed that the perfect balance was the British Constitution in largely its existing form, the educated members of the political nation could safely indulge in the luxury of abstract intellectual discussion of revolution without being regarded (except in moments of extreme political crisis) as subversive or a serious threat to the state. The French Revolution – if not at once, at least after a few years – created quite a different intellectual climate by introducing on to the political stage a new character – dēmos. Abstract philosophical considerations somehow seemed inappropriate when faced with a violent mob; order, control and restraints rapidly acquired new value and urgency. The element in traditional theory which dealt with the varied forms of government disappeared from public debate most rapidly. The other element which looked at the religious origins of government and the spiritual basis of political obligation lasted rather longer and never completely disappeared from the scene, but that too declined relative to the great onrush of arguments stressing religious restraints and sanctions on social behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secularisation Christian political thought in the period from 1760 to 1789 largely followed the ideological agenda set by the Restoration and Revolution Settlements in the later seventeenth century. It was dominated by constitutional and philosophical arguments relating to political authority, obligation and the right of rebellion. In one sense the central tradition itself represented a secularising tendency; the distinction between government in general as the ordinance of God and the particular form of government as the ordinance of man stressed that one area of political theory at least was left for human, secular determination. Some thinkers, like Horne and Wesley, limited this area as much as possible. Others, like Watson, Berington and Robinson, stressed the human autonomy within it. But the degree of secularisation within this latter tradition should not be exaggerated. The role of God in Locke's political philosophy has been demonstrated recently, and the political theory of his disciples in this period remained essentially theocentric. As well as regarding the divine will as the ultimate source of obligation, writers like Watson, Evans and Price based their concept of popular sovereignty upon the God-given equality of man, and reformers like Cartwright and Burgh based their radical arguments on the same premise. Secularisation came less from within the old Locke–Filmer spectrum and more from the Enlightenment mode of thought. The atheist Enlightenment was represented in Britain largely by Hume, Gibbon and Bentham, but their effect was slight compared with that of Christian writers deeply influenced by the new ways of thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Convention was first and foremost a constituent assembly and, during the three turbulent years of its existence, two Constitutions were drafted. The first, that of 1793 (or Year I of the republican era), was set aside ‘until circumstances permitted’. It was never implemented because when stability of a sort did return, after Thermidor (July 1794), less radical ideas prevailed. A more conservative Constitution, that of 1795 (or the Year III), was devised to replace it. This time the document was put into immediate effect and the Convention finally separated. Between its creation in the summer of 1792 and its dissolution in the autumn of 1795 no legislative elections had taken place in France; only at the local level were a few assemblies convened for municipal and judicial purposes. The electorate was instead given an unprecedented opportunity to participate in two constitutional referenda, the first of which was held in the summer of 1793. On 21 September 1792, the day after it assembled, the Convention boldly declared: ‘Before it can be put into effect any constitution must be endorsed by the people.’ The idea of a popular consultation had been mooted in the Constituent Assembly by Pétion as early as September 1789. He suggested that the people should be called upon to arbitrate in the case of deadlock between king and assembly, by simply voting in favour of one side or the other. His colleagues were unimpressed and subsequently refused to submit the Constitution of 1791 to the electorate for ratification. Demands for a ‘referendum’ of this sort were supported by conservative deputies like Malouet, but rejected on the grounds that the National Assembly already incarnated the will of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cahiers de doléances, or lists of grievances, drafted in the towns and villages of France during the spring of 1789, have attracted a great deal of attention from historians, unlike the elections to the Estates General which accompanied them. Yet these elections were of great moment, not only because they mobilised the French people in an unprecedented fashion and created the first generation of revolutionary leaders, but also on account of their legacy to the electoral practice and procedure of the Revolution itself. This has rarely been recognised, since the last Estates General met for only two months before it was transformed into a National Assembly and consigned to the past. Contemporaries were naturally loath to acknowledge any influence of the old régime upon the new and sedulously cultivated the myth of the Revolution as a fresh start. In fact, there was a strong electoral tradition to draw upon for, even during the age of absolutism, elections had persisted at the local, if not central level. A careful study of the poll of 1789 helps to demonstrate the extent to which, in the words of François Furet, ‘the ancien régime influenced the Revolution via the Estates General’. In the first place, the franchise for the final Estates General provoked disagreements which anticipated the famous suffrage debate of succeeding years. The three orders might continue to meet separately, in time-honoured fashion, but all tax-payers were given the vote. Many of them used it, though there were considerable variations in turnout from one community to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The idea that poverty is a relative rather than an absolute concept appears to be widely accepted. Historians recognize that different societies define need and the necessity of relief in different ways. It has even been proposed that the term ‘poverty’ be replaced by ‘deprivation’, in that this automatically suggests greater flexibility and points to the dependency of the threshold of need on culturally determined variables. The relative nature of the concept of ‘poverty’ is usually attributed to two considerations. First, to a series of conventions about what is regarded as a necessity which define acceptable standards of living. Then, there are boundaries, which are also liable to change, that distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor, according to various sets of values and ideological frameworks. Even though they underline the importance of a relativist approach, historians, it seems, hold on to an element of objectivity in the shape of a hierarchy of need, albeit based on the notion of convention. This is seen as the key criterion through which different social and cultural milieux were accustomed to identify and measure poverty and to model their systems of welfare. Such assumptions, in my view, have deeply influenced studies in the field, imposing two major methodological orientations. On the one hand, such studies have considered that the population in receipt of welfare could be taken as revealing the structure if not the dimensions of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction In this chapter I shall deal with the tailors' guild in Turin at the end of the seventeenth and in the first half of the eighteenth century. The analysis proposed is based on a desire to understand the nature of trade associations and the factors which led individuals and different social groups to come together in such associations, and which contributed to their success or to their decline. The association, rather than the trade itself, is the focal point of this paper. Studies about guilds, even recent ones, have tended to identify the activities of a trade with the organizations representing it. By failing to separate their analysis into two parts, such studies have implicitly postulated complete identity between guild and trade. In fact they have tended not to separate the two aspects – guilds and trades – and thus have in effect implicitly postulated a complete identity between the two. This is also the case for studies of conflicts between guilds and their base, since these conflicts have been analysed purely in an economic, or in any case a trade context. Once broad chronological periods dictated by political history are identified, the trajectories of individual guilds are analysed principally in terms of the economic context of the trade or productive roles and mercantile politics. (In the case of Piedmont the periodization substantially follows the lines of that widely proposed for France – and hence has centred on progressive phases of subjection of the guilds to royal authority.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a truism that historical (like all social science) research is influenced by the preoccupations and moods of the society in which the historian works. (In this sense, as Croce put it, all history is contemporary history.) The direction of research is oriented by concepts whose pervasive influence is based on affirmations of widespread, if not universal validity. Inevitably the assumptions underlying such affirmations subsequently emerge as at best limited in space and time, at worst doubtful or unverifiable, while the nature and type of explanation appears as conditioned more or less heavily by contemporary concerns. To identify such phases of research and place them in their precise historical context can be of practical use (beyond its intrinsic historiographical interest) as the very underscoring of the limits of previous work facilitates the identification of new objects, concepts or methods of research. As the pace of change has accelerated in all domains so dramatically in our lifetime, so arguably the aims, methods and strategies of historical research have shifted at a faster pace than in the past. Most striking has been the move away from the optimistic assumptions of the 1950s and 1960s, codified in the dominant academic modes of historical research, to the more sceptical, self-enquiring and necessarily pluralistic approaches of the past decade. This is not the place to engage in a discussion of the theoretical, epistemological and philosophical bases on which historians base their research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the True Church showed William Harrison that the human institution of perpetual monarchy was inherently unable to overcome worldly considerations in order to achieve a full reformation. Yet this bitter lesson contradicted his careful acknowledgement that the presbyterians, whose historical vision of the True Church he shared, threatened dangerous social upheaval in their attempts to reconstruct the godly society without tarrying for the magistrate. Despite his low opinion of princes in general, Harrison had dutifully to suspend his disbelief about Elizabeth's commitment to further reformation. This tension can be partly resolved by an examination of Harrison's views about England's relationship to the ideal godly commonwealth, but an element of incoherence must always be allowed for in his thought, since he belonged to that historical majority of individuals whose less than rigorous thinking allowed them to accept simultaneously a number of logically contradictory propositions. Harrison's very situation encouraged such a lack of rigour, and his subjective interpretation of his contemporary political, social and economic environment also partly explains why this tension never became a destructive element in his thought, why he never developed his views to their logical, extreme conclusion. In this connection we have seen how on different occasions the actions of the political elite both dispelled Harrison's doubts and revived them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harrison expected to find significant meaning in history, for he approached it with the same scrupulous care for the limits of regenerate understanding which he observed in the most important spheres of human knowledge, such as theology. More precisely, his caution in dealing with historical and chronological patterns and periods testifies to their importance in his thought, for he only accepted those which he believed conformed to Elect doctrine. Any periodisation which did not originate in what Harrison regarded as Elect prophecies, or which did not conform to the knowledge transmitted by the covenant line, had to be rejected. Therefore, the periodisations which Harrison rejected only serve to emphasise the importance of those patterns that he accepted as part of Elect knowledge. The following discussion also illustrates the individuality of his vision within this general framework, for the boundaries of legitimate knowledge which he recognised emerged through a process of constant interaction between his contemporary circumstances and his response to the particular Scriptural interpretation of history. Indeed those boundaries could shift under the changing pressure of circumstances. These various and variable influences led Harrison to some strikingly original conclusions on the chronological questions which absorbed the energies of sixteenth-century intellectuals, but the ways in which he arrived at those conclusions have wider implications for his thought. Thus, much can be learned about Harrison's way of thinking by examining his attitudes towards the prophecy of Elias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community and neighbourhood in pre-industrial cities Studies of sixteenth-century provincial cities tend to use the term ‘community’ to describe either the whole city or an urban ‘sub-community’ within it. Dyer thought the urban parish ‘a very distinct community to those living in it’ but also went on to make the unsupported claim that ‘parishes in their turn must have been broken down into street communities’. Phythian-Adams also noted the ‘informal grouping of people into…the neighbourhood’ in early sixteenth-century Coventry and pointed to the evidence for street parties and maypoles as indication of neighbourhood solidarity. The neighbourhood and street communities sometimes identified in pre-industrial cities are thought to be bolstered and maintained by a number of formal and informal institutions. As we shall see in Chapter 10 participation in, and the scope and effectiveness of, local government and church life are often thought to represent the formal foundations of neighbourhood life. Less formally, residential patterns are thought to provide another basis for social cohesion. The ‘degree of contact and intimate intermingling between the various social groups’ is stressed in York, Worcester and Coventry. The existence of the ‘sub-community’ in Worcester was demonstrated by the frequency with which ‘friends and relations all lived in the same small area’; while Phythian-Adams produced some evidence intended to show that kinship ‘lent some reality to the concept of neighbourhood at the street level’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction This chapter outlines the general socio-economic development of rural China during the Ming period. Because I use the term “socio-economic” in its precise meaning, I treat only the most salient aspects of social and economic developments insofar as they interact in the countryside. This chapter examines the ways in which economic factors were reflected in, and sometimes contributed to, the changes in social groupings and organizations during the Ming dynasty. Conversely, the ways in which social factors were reflected in, and sometimes contributed to, economic development are also examined. The taxation and corvée structure is portrayed in some detail. The social and institutional foundation of the li-chia system is discussed for two reasons: first, it offers a window through which we can come to understand some idiosyncratic features of the Ming socio-economic landscape; and second, it was in and of itself a significant cause of change. The possibilities for tax and corvee evasion or exemption were a major force behind social and economic developments during Ming times, as was the government's chronic inability to keep land and population records up to date. This shortcoming was recognized by officials at many levels of the government, and Ming officials implemented many reforms aimed at redistributing tax and corvée levies more equally and at facilitating tax collection. As a result of these changes, although the li-chia structure continued to exist well into the Ch'ing dynasty, by the early seventeenth century in many areas it was radically different in content from the institution envisioned by Chu Yüan-chang, the first Ming emperor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turn of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginnings of the recovery of the network of poor-relief institutions following the crisis-racked years of the 1790s. This recovery owed much to the rehabilitation of the Catholic church by the Concordat between Bonaparte and the Pope in Messidor Year IX (15 July 1801) and the general strengthening of civilian authority under the Consular and Imperial régimes. The Concordat was of far more than religious significance: in the Hérault as in many other departments of the Midi it also contributed forcefully towards the return to a more pacific and routine public life following the lawlessness, the dissensions and the witch-hunts of the Directorial régime. Despite the rough ride which the department gave its first post-Concordat bishop, the irascible and intolerant Rollet, the local church was to be thoroughly overhauled during the long episcopacy of the popular Bishop Fournier (1806–34) and the way paved for the ‘Catholic restoration’ which marked the first half of the nineteenth century in the department. The religious revival had a profound influence on poor-relief institutions which even under the Directory had begun to feel the effects of the religious thaw in the wake of the dechristianising episodes of first Year II and then Year VI. The structure and context of poor relief were effectively ‘rechristianised’ in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Confraternities of dames de la Miséricorde came to recharge the energies of many bureaux de bienfaisance and, although the government insisted that every pauper was openly to justify his state of need, the old concern for secrecy and discretion and the old favouritism towards the pauvre honteux soon crept back into the administration of home relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jamais l'assistance ne fut … plus nécessaire que de 1789 à l'Empire. Whoever won the Revolution [the poor] lost. The Enlightenment and Revolutionary critique of the charitable institutions of the Ancien Régime had been fired by a genuine concern for the fate of the poorer classes and had assumed a greater measure of state involvement in the remedying of abuses. The nature of the state's contribution to hospitals and bureaux de bienfaisance in the Consular and Imperial periods showed how much lower sights had now been set following the fiasco of poor-law reform in the 1790s. So too did the set of initiatives introduced by the central government outside the surviving framework of poor-relief institutions. Tangled, discrete and unambitiously pragmatic, they recalled the limited reform endeavours of the Ancien Régime monarchy. Indeed in several cases, pre-Revolutionary relief measures which had fallen into abeyance were revived in almost exactly their pristine form. This was the case, for example, with the practice of sending chests of medicines into outlying rural areas which was re-established after Year XIII. Rather than remedying geographical imbalances in the supply of medical care, as had been one of the aims of social policy in the early 1790s, the furthest extent of the government's intentions was to offer partial compensation to such areas for their lack of trained medical personnel. The emphasis was once again, therefore, on drugs which could be easily administered by the lay person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voluminous reports of the Comité de Mendicité which the Constituent Assembly established in January 1790 to investigate the provision of poor relief were based on the most thorough national enquiry into poverty and assistance in the eighteenth century. The Comité drew most of its members from the ranks of professional philanthropists and Ancien Régime bureaucrats. Its views, which were more or less reducible to those of its foremost member, the egregious and indefatigable Duc de Larochefoucauld-Liancourt, constituted in breadth of outlook and sympathies a sort of intellectual testament to the social thinking of the Enlightenment. They also provided the framework for government action for most of the Revolutionary decade. Empirical investigations confirmed members of the Comité in their view that, by permitting charity to remain the foundation of the body of poor-relief institutions and by failing thereby to give aid where and when it was needed, the Ancien Régime and above all the church had tacitly acknowledged the insuperability of the problems of poverty and distress. Even the plans for a parish poor-rate on English lines, such as the ill-fated Bureau de Mendicité had endeavoured to introduce in 1764 and 1765, would have failed to remedy that misery which resulted from flagrant disparities of wealth between regions. The Comité was convinced that only the state, by centralising all relief funds in its own hands and by distributing assistance rationally according to criteria such as surface area, population and tax burden, could possibly hope to eradicate obdurate pockets of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we have seen, the diminishing capicity of charity and its works to cope with the burgeoning problem of poverty was far from a purely local phenomenon. From about the middle of the eighteenth century, the question of how best to organise the relief of poverty on the ruins of existing forms of charity had become a matter of public remark and open polemic. The case of the Montpellier region suggests that, far from being confined to the utopian lucubrations of a handful of out-of-touch Parisian intellectuals, this crisis was rooted in the everyday experience of those individuals who came into contact with the institutions. The dilemmas of hospital administrators, the selective dispositions of charitable donors and the muted pathos of popular attitudes all, in their different ways, underpinned the debate and ran in counterpoint to the arguments of philosophes and social thinkers. The arguments of the latter were thus not merely a product of their rational preferences, but also a telling and informed reflection of the actual performance of charity and its works. The primacy which the hospitals enjoyed at the centre of poor-relief provision was a major bone of contention. The hôpital général – the paradigmatic poor-relief institution since the middle of the seventeenth century – was coming to be seen as outdated. It no longer seemed to make economic sense to pour scanty charitable resources into these cumbersome and top-heavy institutions. The experiences of hospital administrators in the Montpellier region highlighted the extent to which high costs, in an age of inflation and population expansion, had made the care and supervision of hospital inmates progressively uneconomic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to obtain a fully rounded picture of the treatment of poverty in the last half-century of the Ancien Régime, it is necessary to consider the attitudes of the poor themselves to establishments and individuals who proffered them aid. Although first-hand evidence is extremely scanty – the poor leave only too few direct statements on any subject – this line of investigation is worth pursuing through inference and induction and from second-hand evidence and opinion. Only with the dimension afforded by the view ‘from below’ added to the ideas and dilemmas of institutional administrators and charitable donors can the traditional forms of poor relief be fully assessed. Only then, furthermore, can the efforts of, first, royal bureaucrats and then in the 1790s, of the Revolutionary assemblies, to transform the whole dispensation of relief, be properly understood. The poor's attitudes towards poor relief overlapped on one hand with their feelings about charity, and on the other with their ideas on healing and medicine. The present chapter will concentrate upon the first of these fields. It is vital to grasp at the outset that the poor felt their self-respect to be compromised by the acceptance of relief. To accept charity was to admit failure to achieve the economic independence which was the ultimate aim of the popular classes. If anonymous outsiders to the community did not risk shame by begging their living, by receiving handouts or by entering a hospital, the same was not true of the resident poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The medieval image of the pauper as Christ's representative, his earthly surrogate, the quasi-divine instrument of the charity – and thus the salvation – of the rich man, had long encouraged bountifulness towards the poor. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory, with its emphasis on good works on earth piling up spiritual credit in the after life, contributed towards the continuing vitality of this image even as, from the late Middle Ages onwards, a counter-view developed in which the pauper became a source of moral, social and political danger. The Catholic Reformation in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries affirmed the virtues of almsgiving. The halo of holy poverty was still sufficiently intact in the eighteenth century for churchmen to utilise the instrumental view of the pauper inherited from the Middle Ages as a means of invoking the charity of their congregations. For Abbé Cambacérès, for example, one of Montpellier's foremost ecclesiastics in the last decades of the Ancien Régime and the uncle of Napoleon's archichancelier, the pauper remained, in God's providential plan, en quelque sorte le plus intéressant de ses ouvrages et le secret de sa sagesse, qui a rendu le pauvre précieux et nécessaire au riche; qui a voulu que le riche fût le protecteur du pauvre et le pauvre le sauveur des riches, qui les délivre du danger des richesses sur la terre en leur offrant les moyens de les convertir en charité qui leur servent à acheter le ciel. If the mainspring of almsgiving was religious, its forms and contexts were limitless. Besides the more formalised execution of religious foundations, almsgiving was an unthinking reflex among the orthodox Catholic laity and clergy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]