This study redresses the North and South imbalance of much of the work in British economic and social history by focusing on the impact of the building trade. The period 1450-1750 witnessed substantial changes in England, including the size of national population, the range of industry, agricultural techniques, and the proportion of population tied to the soil. Using sources from local archives, the author addresses conditions of work in the building trades, levels of remuneration, gender differences in work, and relationships with employers.

In this study Mr Baines has devised a method of estimating the county of birth of all permanent emigrants from England and Wales in the last four decades of the nineteenth century - some 2.3 million people. He has related the rate and timing of migration to the social and economic characteristics of the counties, which has provided answers to many of the outstanding questions in the history of English emigration, including, for example, the idea of an 'Atlantic Economy' and the extent to which Welsh migration was distinct from or integrated into the English pattern. Briefly, the book...

The enormous growth of London during the early modern period brought with it major social problems, yet, as Steve Rappaport demonstrates in this innovative study, Tudor London was essentially a stable society, subject to stress but never seriously threatened by widespread popular unrest or other forms of instability. Professor Rappaport looks once again at the nature, causes, and effects of the principal threats to the capital's stability in the sixteenth century - the threefold increase in population, the economic impact of such demographic expansion, the substantial rise in prices and the...

This book uses a local study of the Blean area of Kent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explore some of the more significant societal changes of the modern Western world. Drawing on a wide range of research techniques, including family reconstitution and oral history, Barry Reay examines topics such as marriage and fertility, health and mortality, the work of women and children, and illegitimacy and sexuality. This book is an exciting example of the "new rural history," and will be of interest to rural and family historians, as well as demographers and sociologists.

This book provides a detailed examination of the demographic behavior of families during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a sample of fourteen villages in five different regions of Germany. It is based on the reconstituted family histories of vital events (births, deaths and marriages) compiled by genealogies for the entire populations of these villages. The book applies the type of micro-level analysis possible with family reconstitution data for the crucial period leading to and encompassing the early stages of the demographic transition, including the initial onset of the decline...

This book provides a penetrating account of death and disease in early modern England. Using a wide range of sources for the southeast of England, the author highlights the tremendous variation in levels of mortality across geographical contours and across two centuries of time. She explores the epidemiological causes and consequences of these mortality variations, and offers the reader a fascinating insight into the way patients and practitioners perceived, understood and reacted to the multitude of fevers, poxes and plagues in past times.

Industry in the Countryside is a wide-ranging and readable study of the nature of manufacturing before the Industrial Revolution. It examines the widely-debated theory of 'proto-industrialisation', drawing on data from the Kentish Weald - an area which was already a centre of cottage industry in the Tudor era and was also the earliest rural manufacturing region to 'de-industrialise'. The book analyses the Wealden textile industry from its workforce to its industrialists and emphasises the ubiquity of dual employment among textile workers. It explores the local context of cottage industry,...

A Community Transformed traces the restructuring of Havering between 1500 and 1620 through detailed analysis of demographic patterns, the economy, religion, social and cultural forms, and local administration and law. McIntosh's study, the most complex and richly drawn portrait of any English community in this period, goes beyond local history in illuminating the transition from medieval to early modem life. A Community Transformed is the sequel to Professor McIntosh's acclaimed work Autonomy and Community: The Royal Manor of Havering, 1200 1500, published by Cambridge in 1986."

Through an examination of 255 places in England, Professor McIntosh argues against the suggestion that social regulation was a distinctive feature of the decades around 1600, resulting from Puritanism, and demonstrates that concern with wrongdoing mounted gradually between 1370 and 1600. This trail-breaking study of how English people defined and attempted to control misbehavior opens up little-known sources and new research methods, challenges many historical assumptions and sheds light on the transition from early medieval to early modern patterns.

This book is a detailed examination of the demographic policy of Mussolini's Fascist regime. Based on archival research, it examines both the Italian statistics, and the demographic theory of the time. The author shows how the Fascists used statistics to mold public opinion through propaganda, as well as to form policy. He describes their program to increase the population in Italy, and reveals what the policy behind this program tells us about the contradictory nature of Fascism itself--it was at the same time modern and antimodern, revolutionary and reactionary.