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The clans retain little now of their original character, their ferocity of temper is softened, their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their contempt of government subdued, and the reverence for their chiefs abated. Of what they had before the late conquest of their country, there remain only their language and their poverty. Our geographers seem to be almost as much at a loss in the description of this north part of Scotland, as the Romans were to conquer it; and they are obliged to fill it up with hills and mountains, as they do the inner parts of Africa, with lions and elephants, for want of knowing what else to place there. It would be only a small exaggeration to say that the images that many of us associate with the Scottish Highlands have their origins in Walter Scott's first novel, Waverley. Scott started writing Waverley in 1805, though he dropped it for several years and only completed it in 1814. The novel, which is set mostly in Scotland during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, not only presented to its nineteenth-century readers a romanticized view of the Jacobite rebels and their leader; it offered, virtually for the first time, an altogether new series of images and representations of the Scottish Highlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I would enshrine the spirit of the past For future restoration. 'Tis not, what it once was, the world, But a rude heap together hurled, All negligently overthrown, Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone. Your lesser world contains the same, But in more decent order tame; You, heaven's centre, nature's lap, And paradise's only map. Let me then invite the Reader to turn his eyes with me towards that cluster of Mountains at the Head of Windermere; it is probable that they will settle ere long upon the Pikes of Langdale and the black precipice contiguous to them. – If these objects be so distant that, while we look at them, they are only thought of as the crown of a comprehensive Landscape; if our minds be not perverted by false theories, unless those mountains be seen under some accidents of nature, we shall receive from them a grand impression, and nothing more. But if they be looked at from a point which has brought us so near that the mountain is almost the sole object before our eyes, yet not so near but that the whole of it is visible, we shall be impressed with a sensation of sublimity. Wordsworth's poetics of landscape are concerned above all with images and with the production of images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of parliamentary parties, and their swift maturing after 1740, was one of the most remarkable features of the Age of Liberty. Nowhere else in Europe, save in England, did a comparable development occur. It proved, indeed, but a short-lived episode; it left no permanent traces behind it; but while it lasted it imparted to the age a hectic quality which grew more intense as the regime neared the final catastrophe. It has been said that the emergence of parties is an inevitable consequence of parliamentary government; that as soon as a legislature begins to decide important questions by voting, parties will be organised in order to secure a majority. But there was nothing inevitable in the appearance of parties in Sweden; and the Constitution of 1720 had been in operation for almost twenty years before they can be said to have begun to take shape. Swedish parties were born of personal ambitions and personal rancours: with differences of opinion on high political questions, with clashes arising from issues of principle, they had – at first – very little to do. No ancient controversies, constitutional or religious, provided them with historic roots; and though they came fairly soon to appeal to persons of differing types of temperament, they were not in origin the vehicle or expression of such differences. The first Swedish party was rather an artefact, a device imposed from above to forward the ends of its devisers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this and the following chapters, we pass from the general and contextual considerations of the first two parts of our study to a discussion of the different types and selected cases of early modern revolution. Our aim in this present part is to bring out the distinctive forms and variety of revolutions in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries and to illuminate by means of some particular examples the range and permutations of revolutionary action that the early modern world engendered. We begin with agrarian rebellion, the most profound, the fiercest expression of defiance and resistance by the common folk of this society. Here we enounter, first of all, the peasant. But, like his medieval forebears how rarely did he speak for himself, how difficult it is to know his thoughts and feelings! Although revolt may occasionally throw a strong light on his mind and griefs, he remains obscure, a part of the great inarticulate mass at the base of his society. Yet he is an inescapable figure, as elemental as the great tortoise of Indian mythology, which was said to uphold the world, for it was his obedience and toil that sustained the princes, nobilities, and landlords, his rulers and betters. In the main we are compelled to see the peasant through eyes remote or different from his own, from the angle of the literate and those who did not share his life. Numerous images of him exist among the wealth of contemporary prints and paintings, most memorably of all, perhaps, in the art of the great Netherlander master, Pieter Brueghel, born around the time of the German peasant war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the two preceding chapters, we have been examining the context of our early modern revolutions primarily from the standpoint of structures – both structures of society and structures of government and politics. In the first, we have considered the form of society in which these revolutions occurred, certain of the larger collectivities of which it consisted as a society of orders, and their pertinent characteristics and interrelations. In the second, we have looked at the monarchical state of the period, its political system and governmental features, and the weaknesses to which it was prone. We are justified in describing these as structures because we are dealing in both cases with durable configurations persisting through time in a dynamic interplay of institutions and conditions, which create at once the arena and limits of possible action by revolutionary actors. There will be a specific determinate relation between every revolutionary event and these structures that enclose them and with whose general characteristics they are in some particular way coordinated. In the present chapter we have in view a different kind of context, consisting not of structures but of events, contingencies, and trends belonging broadly to the economic domain. These do, of course, interact with structures and may help to modify them in the long run, but they are nevertheless distinct from them. The matters that fall under this head have sometimes been referred to by French scholars as conjoncture. They include prices, taxes, rents, subsistence crises, trade cycles, contractions and expansions – in short, singular occurrences and short- and long-term movements and convergences chiefly of an economic character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do we care about the urban demographic transition? A reconstruction of the demographic dimensions of the urban transition should help improve our understanding of the First Industrial Revolution. Certainly it is essential in searching for answers to any of the following questions: Did English cities grow more by natural increase than by migration? Did city immigration rates rise as industrialization accelerated? Did rural emigration rates respond vigorously to the employment demands of rapid city growth, or were rural Englishmen more attached to the land than has been true of other industrial revolutions? Was migration selective? If so, what was the impact of the selectivity on the city economy? What role did push and pull forces play in rural and urban labor markets? These questions have always been at center stage in debates about the First Industrial Revolution. The answers will hinge on an assessment of those forces creating and displacing jobs in the two labor markets, as well as on the migration behavior thought to link them, assessments which cannot be made without the prior demographic reconstruction performed in this chapter. Consider, for example, the Third World overurbanization debate which was initiated by Bert Hoselitz in the 1950s. His thesis was that urbanization was outpacing industrialization in the sense that urban populations were large relative to industrial jobs, at least when compared with late nineteenth-century experience (Hoselitz 1955, 1957). The implication was that urban labor was moving into low-wage, residual service underemployment by default. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 20 June 1632 Charles I issued a proclamation ‘commanding the Gentry to keepe their Residence at their Mansions in the Countrey, and forbidding them to make their habitations in London, and places adjoyning’. The document gave voice to several concerns about the growth of London: the city was becoming difficult to govern, was increasingly vulnerable to dearth and disease and was intolerably burdened by the cost of maintaining the poor, including those who followed the rich into town. But the influx of gentry also denuded the localities, depriving them of their natural rulers, those who had customarily ‘served the King in severall places according to their Degrees and Rankes’. In consequence the poor were left unrelieved by hospitality, uncontrolled by good discipline and without adequate employment. Finally, the removal of the gentry to town was alleged to have adverse economic consequences, encouraging the consumption of luxury imports ‘from Forraigne parts, to the enriching of other Nations, and unnecessary consumption of a great part of the Treasure of this Realm’. The remedy for these ills was the return of the gentry to their native seats, and the Caroline government did not hesitate to order all those not holding office in the council or royal household back into the country. An exception was made for periods of the law-terms, for the transaction of essential business ‘so as they doe not by pretence thereof remove their families, but leave the same to continue in the Countrey, and keep their houses and Hospitality…’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Newes’, wrote Thomas Cromwell to John Creke on 17 August 1523, ‘refresshith the spy[rit] of lyffe’. His letter followed hard upon the dissolution four days earlier of the only parliament summoned during Wolsey's chancellorship. Wherfor ye shall vnderstonde that by long tyme I amongist other haue Indured a parlyament which contenwid by the space of xvij hole wekes wher we communyd of warre, pease, Stryffe, contencyon, debatte, murmure, grudge, Riches, pouerte, penurye, trowth, falshode, Justyce, equyte, discayte, opprescyon, Magnanymyte, actyuyte, force, attempraunce, Treason, murder, Felonye, consyli[ation], and also how a commune welth myght be ediffyed and a[lso] contenewid within our Realme. Howbeyt in conclusyon we haue d[one] as our predecessors haue been wont to doo that ys to say, as well as we myght and lefte wher we begann. That this parliament was acrimonious thanks to Wolsey's heavy-handedness is uncontroversial. The cardinal soured the atmosphere from the start by demanding supply of £800,000 on top of the £204,424 he collected from the laity by means of ‘loans’ in 1522–3.3 When the commons mustered, Wolsey blustered. He retorted ‘that he would rather have his tongue, plucked out of his hedde with a paire of pinsons, then to move the kyng, to take any lesse some’; he tried to overawe M.P.s but met ‘a marvellous obstinate silence’; he lied that the lords had offered the requisite taxation; he reneged on his promise of 1522 that the ‘loans’ would be repaid out of the proceeds of the next parliamentary subsidy. Yet what proportion of the parliament was taken up by the subsidy negotiations? Did Wolsey have intentions besides taxation in 1523 that, in the event, he was unable to pursue? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We turn now therefore to a consideration of conflict generally in nineteenth-century Corsica, of which feuding was only a part. Here we will distinguish conflicts of material interest, conflicts of honour, intrafamilial and inter-community conflict. Writing in 1841, Léon Griffon, a former teacher at the college of Calvi, isolated the unremitting pursuit of material interest as a particular Corsican trait, linking it to the island's poverty and lack of natural resources: ‘Corsicans need to practise the strictest economy … and they have thus become sordidly materialistic to the point that they will never agree to anything unless they see an advantage in it for themselves.’ Other observers shared this view and pointed to the intense competitiveness which reigned at all levels of Corsican society. Again and again, trial summaries make the point that conflicts arose from ‘reasons of interest’ or ‘differences of interest’, and causing deliberate damage was probably the commonest form of offence against property all through the nineteenth century. As we have seen, moreover, attacks on material resources were part and parcel of feuding. ‘How many affronts were inflicted on you!’, a wife told her dead husband in a lament. ‘Walls pulled down, / Grange set on fire, / Trees cut down … / Then they killed your oxen / Asleep in the straw; / Alas, it was on that day … / [that you said] “I have had enough. / The blood of my oxen / Will be avenged”’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally recognized that feuding takes place over long spans of time. But social anthropologists cannot usually describe this essential feature of feuding directly, since they know the societies which they study only in the short term. At best, they may learn the prevailing mythological history of a feud from one or both parties to it, though even this may be missing, as feuding itself dies out and the memory of it is either forgotten or repressed. As a long-term phenomenon and one that was very important in medieval and early modern Europe, feuding is therefore the proper object of historical study. Historians, however, are not usually in practice much better placed as investigators, since the indirect and fragmentary nature of their evidence precludes detailed reconstruction of the chronology of individual feuds. Corsica, however, belongs to that small number of societies where feuding survived into the modern period within the purview of agents of a relatively efficient bureaucratic State. From administrative reports, judicial records and other sources, it is possible to trace the history of feuds in a number of villages from the end of the eighteenth century, thus filling a gap in our general knowledge of how feuds work as well as providing a basis for the more extended treatment of the subject in the chapters which follow. We have selected as examples those villages where the evidence is most complete or where distinctive patterns of feuding may be discerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corsica is the third largest Mediterranean island after Sicily and Sardinia. It measures just over 50 miles from east to west and just over 100 from north to south and is situated at about 50 miles from the present Italian and at about 100 from the present French coast. The landscape is dominated by two mountain chains, one smaller of schist in the north-east, the other much larger of granite in the south-west. The average altitude is 1,864 feet, and the highest peak, Monte Cinto, reaches 8,890 feet within 20 miles of the sea. If nature has made Corsica on this grand scale, she has by the same token made it poor. Less than a third of the territory of the island was cultivated through the nineteenth century. Of the remainder, some 20 per cent was forest and some 50 per cent maquis, natural pasture or waste. The most important timber tree was the Corsican pine (laricio), which grows to 150–160 feet and is found at altitudes of over 3,000 feet, together with beech and fir. Maritime pine, found at lower levels, was tapped extensively for resin. Below 1,500 feet there was holm oak, used for charcoal, firewood and tannin, and cork oak. The roots of tree-heather were grubbed up for pipe wood. There were also important chestnut plantations, to which we will return. Though the forests were exploited in these ways, they were difficult of access, even after special roads had been built in the second half of the century, and they were the object of dispute between the State and local communities, attached to their grazing and use rights and opposed therefore to long-term commercial concessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most important item on the agenda of development is to transform the food sector, create agricultural surpluses to feed the urban population and thereby create the domestic basis for industry and modern services. If we can make this domestic change, we shall automatically have a new international economic order. West Africa's international significance There are three criteria by which the big powers evaluate their interest in Third World regions such as West Africa: in descending order of significance, (1) global strategy, (2) economic resources, and (3) humanitarian concern. West Africa is clearly a region of low strategic significance. It is far removed from the Middle East and southern Africa, the nearest centers of global conflict. But the sixteen West African nations play a part in both through their membership in the Organization of African Unity and other international organizations. And Nigeria is a state with the potential to play a dominant role in the affairs of the continent as a whole. Nigeria is one of the few OPEC countries with a large population; it is a major oil supplier of the United States and an important market for both the United States and Britain. France has an obvious interest in maintaining close ties with her ex-colonies in West Africa, as part of a long-term plan of informal expansion in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter deals with the various types of land cultivated in Fontelas. Firstly, I describe the major geographical characteristics of the area: aspects of the hamlet's location, climate, vegetation, and soil. Some basic features of the community's spatial organization (streets, houses, shops) are also introduced. Secondly, I look at the open-field system of rye grain cultivation, with its major features of biennial rotation and stubble-grazing. Thirdly, I examine collective rights in the hamlet's common-land, along with a number of local administrative minutes affording historical evidence of the division of small portions of common-land into individual plots. Fourthly, I provide a short description of three further types of land in Fontelas: irrigated meadows, kitchen-gardens, and vineyards. Throughout the chapter, some initial materials on the unequal distribution of land in the hamlet are set forth. These will provide a background for my subsequent analysis of land and social groups in Chapter 3. Geographical characteristics The terrain surrounding Fontelas is plateau land characterized by a varied topography of mountains, hills, valleys, and rivers. The concelho (municipality) in which Fontelas is located has a total area of 70,328 hectares (703.28 sq km). This area comprises both the land of the vila (municipal town) as well as that of its 34 rural freguesias (parishes). A crude average would thus yield approximately 2,000 hectares (20 sq km) of land per parish, although individual parishes and hamlets clearly vary in their total area due to variations in terrain. The terrain of the parish of Mosteiro can be approximated at 2,400 hectares (24 sq km). [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]

A system of exchange can easily have unintended consequences, consequences that can have a catastrophic effect on the fates of thousands of people while other parties to the system go on as before, blithely ignorant of the impact of their actions. Each participant sees only a tiny part of the whole. For the rest each must depend on hearsay. This was the dilemma that piqued European thinkers to reflect on trade with a new urgency in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The vicissitudes of commerce increased with its volume; the reversals and uncertainties and bitter surprises to which it gave rise forced on consciousness a need to grasp the systemic underpinnings of trade's unintended consequences. Strangely, however, the eventual outcome of this reflection was a doctrine of indifference. The existence of system was perceived, but once perceived it was declared best left alone. The individual's ignorant carrying out of his business, indifferent to the larger consequences, was discovered to be beneficial to the whole. Western thinkers no sooner gained a new insight into the systemic nature of exchange relationships than they renounced all use of it. How did this come about? THE DOCTRINE OF EQUAL EXCHANGE The forms of exchange that a new group of economic theorizers wished to defend in seventeenth-century England were undoubtedly grounded in a desire for monetary profit. Speculation in grain, lending at interest, foreign currency transactions, and enclosures of common land were all highly structured established practices that involved individuals who had no desire to create broader, multivalent relationships with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new kind of society emerged in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On this there is widespread agreement; agreement also extends to characterizations of the kind of society that emerged: that it was an individualistic society, based on laissez-faire economic policies and on liberal political institutions, and that it made possible a pace of economic expansion never known before, ensuring Europe a century of unchallenged world domination. Argument has persisted, however, over three mutually interconnected issues: (i) the origins or causes of this transformation, (2) the extent to which its economic and political elements necessarily entailed one another, and (3) how broadly the benefits of this social transformation extended themselves through the social hierarchy. The peculiarities of national history have ensured that each of these points of contention has exercised a different set of national historians. The question of origins has stimulated a long and spirited debate among historians in France seeking to account for the outbreak and course of the Revolution of 1789–99. The problem of the relation between the political and economic elements of the transformation has been most keenly felt among historians of Germany in particular and of Central Europe in general, because in that region certain political institutions and entrenched power elites were able to put off liberal political reform and in the end to dilute its effects even as society around them moved toward a free-trade economy and rapid industrialization. The question of the distribution of benefits from this transformation has been most intensely debated in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]