The great depression of the inter-war years was the most profound shock ever to strike the world economy, and is widely held to have led directly to the collapse of parliamentary democracy in many countries. This study of Greece in the inter-war period, however, demonstrates that there was no simple correlation between economic and political crisis. Drawing on detailed statistical research, Mazower explores how an underdeveloped country like Greece was able to recover so quickly from the economic crisis. He examines the complex processes involved, showing how recovery, like crisis, threatened...

This is a scholarly study of the collision of Goths and Romans in the fourth and fifth centuries. Gothic tribes played a major role in the destruction of the western half of the Roman Empire between 350 and 500, establishing successor kingdoms in southern France and Spain (the Visigoths), and in Italy (the Ostrogoths).

Our historical understanding of this Migration Period' has been based upon the Gothic historian Jordanes, whose mid-sixth-century Getica suggests that the Visigoths and Ostrogoths entered the Empire already established as coherent groups and simply conquered new...

A study of the political philosophy of Herbert Spencer, this book examines the thought of the man considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of Victorian Britain, and the ideas of the Individualists, a group of political thinkers inspired by him to uphold the policy of laissez-faire during the 1880s and 1890s. Despite their important contribution to nineteenth-century political debate, these thinkers have been neglected by historians, who Taylor argues have concentrated instead on the advocates of an enhanced role for government in economic and social affairs. Offering the first...

The first scholarly study of the Royal Navy during the reigns of Charles II and James II, this book assesses the traditional picture of the Restoration Navy in the light of recent scholarship, using the evidence not only of Samuel Pepys, the greatest diarist and naval administrator of the age, but also that of his contemporaries. Davies examines the reactions of naval personnel to the demands imposed by Pepys, and analyzes the structure of the service. He also explores the lives and attitudes of the men (the "tarpaulins") and their officers -- the quests for promotion, enrichment, and glory,...

This book explores how the Victorians perceived and explained female crime, and how they responded to it--both in penal theory and prison practice. Victorian England women made up a far larger proportion of those known to be involved in crime than they do today: the nature of female criminality attracted considerable attention and preoccupied those trying to provide for women within the penal system. Zedner's rigorously researched study examines the extent to which gender-based ideologies influenced attitudes to female criminality. She charts the shift from the moral analyses dominant in the...

This is the first scholarly history of the rise of the Townshends, who were to become the most famous landowning family in Norfolk. Moreton exploits to the full the rich family archives in order to tell the story of individuals such as Roger Townshend I, a prominent lawyer of the late fifteenth century, and his son, also Roger, a leading country gentlemen. Moreton traces the growth in the Townshends' wealth and power in the late middle ages, and sets them in their context as a major gentry family. Their lawsuits, their estates policy, and their sheep-farming activities reveal much about the...

This is a study of the books of Salisbury Cathedral and their scribes and readers in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. These manuscripts form the largest collection of manuscripts to have survived from any English center in the period following the Norman Conquest, and they bear witness to the energetic scribal and scholarly activities of a community of intelligent and able men. Webber traces the interests and activities of the canons of Salisbury Cathedral from the evidence of their books. She reveals to us a lively Anglo-Norman center of scholarship and religious devotion....

Black Country Elites is a study of the people who ran Victorian industrial towns; it also examines the institutions, policies, rituals, and networks these urban elites deployed to cope with urban growth, social unrest, and relative economic decline. Concentrating on a particularly grimy district of the industrial Midlands, the book demonstrates the surprisingly great resources, coherence, sophistication and impact of the area's mainly middle class leaders, who were well linked to regional and national power centers. The strength of this provincial industrial elite suggests the need to...

This is the first full scholarly study of the relationship between native secular law and the church in medieval Wales. The interaction was close, despite Archbishop Pecham's condemnation of native law as the work of the devil. Huw Pryce assesses the influence of the church on Welsh law, examining the participation of churchmen in the composition of lawbooks and the administration of legal processes and analyzing ecclesiastical criticism of native customs, notably those concerning marriage. He considers the extent to which Welsh law defended the authority and possessions of the church,...

This is a meticulous and scholarly study of the polemical press of the 1740s, and the first substantial investigation of the politics of the Pelham regime for a generation. Robert Harris examines the vigorous and wide-ranging debate in tracts and periodicals about the principal issues of the day--the fall of Walpole, the influence of Hanover, the Forty-Five, and the War of the Austrian Succession. Harris's detailed analysis of the confusing and fragmented politics of the 1740s sheds important light on patterns of change and continuity in the political culture of mid-eighteenth-century English...