Pre-industrial England Research Articles

Book Review: Coastal and River Trade in Pre-Industrial England: Bristol and Its Region 1680–1730

Book Review: Coastal and River Trade in Pre-Industrial England: Bristol and Its Region 1680–1730

The New Institutionalism in Sociology

Foreword Robert K. Kerton Introduction 1. Sources of the new institutionalism Victor Nee Part I. Institutions and Social Norms: 2. Embeddedness and beyond: institutions, exchange and social structure Victor Nee and Paul Ingram 3. Of coase and cattle: dispute resolution among neighbors in Shasta County Robert C. Ellickson 4. Cultural beliefs and the organization of society: a historical and theoretical reflection on collectivist and individualist societies Avner Greif 5. Conflict over changing social norms: bargaining, ideology, and enforcement Jack Knight and Jean Ensminger 6. Embeddedness and immigration: notes on the social determinants of economic action Alejandro Portes and Julia Sensenbrenner Part II. Institutional Embeddedness in Capitalist Economies: 7. The organization of economies Gary G. Hamilton and Robert Feenstra 8. Institutional embeddedness in Japanese labor markets Mary C. Brinton and Takehiko Kariya 9. Winner-take-all markets and wage discrimination Robert H. Frank 10. Institutions and the labor market Bruce Western Part III. Institutional Change and Economic Performance: 11. Economic performance through time Douglass C. North 12. changing the rules interests, organizations, and institutional change in the US hospitality Paul Ingram 13. The importance of the local: rural institutions and economic change in preindustrial England Rosemary L. Hopcroft 14. Outline of an institutionalist theory of inequality: the case of socialist and postcommunist Eastern Europe Ivan Szelenyi and Eric Kostello Index.

Antagonizing the Present: Reflections on the “Ugliness” of the Contemporary American Landscape

deploring contemporary American landscape, arguing that its corresponds to an inner ugliness of today's self-centered, consumption-obsessed, technology-hawking Americans.1 Published by University of Alabama Press, newest and perhaps most opinionated work in this genre is Egotopia: Narcissism and American Landscape, written by John Miller, a Silicon Valley public relations consultant and founder of Scenic America, based in Washington, D.C.2 Generously praised by likes of cultural critic Ashley Montagu, Egotopia, like other similar books on market, has garnered a fair amount of press attention. Moreover, it has resonated with many of my architecture and landscape architecture students, who believe that it articulates their concern for commercializing of American landscape and, perhaps more important, related concern for diminishing cultural authority of professional designers of built environment. Because of this apparent nerve touched, Egotopia is an ideal target for scholarly reflection on genre. Implicitly reminding his readers of historical precedent for his critique, Miller quotes William Blake, British romantic poet. In his poem Milton, Blake used term dark Satanic Mills (referring to coal-burning factories that increasingly blackened landscape of preindustrial England) as a metaphor for both negative human implications of industrialization and for site for potential redemption. In his extended misapplication of Blake, Miller observes that more than 150 years after Blake's death we continue to be infatuated by of... [the] agrarian epoch. To Miller, this longevity bespeaks a fundamental validity-a subconscious yearning for of paradise lost (pp. 1-2). Our current inability to acknowledge this longing-due to apparent uselessness of aesthetics in our utilitarian culture-is basic to contemporary problem, as Miller sees it. Dark satanic malls are harbingers of a New American (pp. 4-5). The problem that Miller presents arises, in his understanding, from nexus of capitalism and democratization-and specifically from emphasis of both on individual self-interest. The American Landscape, Miller explains, is designed to serve singular purpose of encouraging Americans to consume in a perpetual quest to fulfill their private individual desires. As such, American Landscape obliterates natural and historical experience, eclipsing local or regional distinctiveness and leading to dramatic disestablishment of and a total enshrinement of his private alter ego, New Man (pp. 16-17).3 Miller finds this in America's past, where he personified transcendence of self-interest and and practiced benign disinterestedness as most powerful alternative to private passion (p. 26). The Man, in contrast, marginalizes selftranscendence .... [He] no longer imitates God, nor even some generalized Platonic version of man (p. 28). The egotism of is evidenced by decline of sources of ormative behavior-such as church, school, and home- in favor of psychotherapy, which enables individuals to maximize their private objectives (pp. 30-31). Miller believes that because concerns come out of disinterestedness, these concerns die with increasing self-absorption of Man. In his choice of protagonist as past and antagonist as present, Miller allies himself with a long tradition of critics who deal in ahistorical: They consistently invoke an endangered refinement and enlightenment-in a European sense-in retreat from an advancing barbarism and ignorance. The poet Matthew Arnold, whose thought perhaps most shaped this discourse, was such a critic of mid-nineteenth-century British culture. His influential Culture and Anarchy reminds us that this type of cultural criticism stems from struggle between groups dominating society and their challengers in a given moment.4 As Miller perceives changes occurring in society today, Arnold perceived increasing political power of urban and industrial working classes of Victorian England as representing anarchy and confusion, a disruption of established social order. To stabilize this disruption, both critics call for reinforcing cultural standards of previous regime. Miller's Public Men replicate Arnold's great of culture, members of priestly caste that preserves culture in a society, who were to be apostles of equality (p. 38), bringing sweetness [beauty] and light [intelligence to] ... and unkindled masses (p. 37). The raw and unkindled masses, of course, were common people-those linked by shared experience among dark Satanic mills and who agitated for power in an industrializing Britain. Against this onslaught, great men would preserve the that had been thought and said in world, in Arnold's words. But this best necessarily reflects values of great men-of a class already in possession of power to articulate and canonize those aspects of culture that advanced their interests. Critics from Arnold to Miller cast these supposedly traditional standards as absolute-granted by nature or God-and therefore above historical moment. For those of us who believe that any given aesthetic standard is a set of artificial codes of valuation tied to relations of power in society, this should be point at which we step back from Miller's argument. Journal ofArchitectural Education, pp. 191-193 @ 1999 ACSA, Inc.

Historical perspectives on the shifting boundaries around youth and alcohol. The example of pre-industrial England, 1350-1750.

This study identifies some of the factors that account for why young males are permitted to drink in some cultures and not in others. The primary materials consulted in this study suggest that in the case of pre-industrial England the same norms governed both adult and juvenile access to alcohol in the late medieval period, and that separate standards for adults and juveniles only emerged some time after 1500. The materials also suggest that the norms governing juvenile access to alcohol were at their most restrictive when adult and juvenile labour were both in low demand, and when childhood was a state from which an individual exited at an early age, but adulthood was a status that was postponed for a large proportion of the population. Apparent changes in the norms governing juvenile access to alcohol also coincided with two other developments in the early modern period. These were: (1) the gradual transformation of drinking into an essentially recreational activity conducted outside the home and among groups consisting largely or entirely of males; and (2) the introduction of new and potentially more intoxicating alcoholic beverages, first in the form of beer, and later in the form of cheap spirits distilled from grain.

Land Hunger: Land as a Commodity and as a Status Good, England, 1500–1910

Historians believe that land in preindustrial societies was sought partly for status. Later land became a commodity like any other. Per unit of monetary return preindustrial land prices should thus be higher than those of nonstatus assets. Surprisingly in England from 1560 to 1800 the price of land per £1 of return was little above that of nonstatus assets. Only in the 19th century does a possible price premium emerge. Any change in the land market in England from 1560 to 1910 was the reverse of the expected: from land as a commodity in preindustrial England to land as a status good in industrial England.

Progenitors of modern management accounting concepts and mensurations in pre-industrial England

Edwards and Newell (1994: 407) noted that ‘the application of accounting techniques in business management continues to be a largely unexplored area of business history’. Outcomes of this lack of research and knowledge are simplistic conclusions such as ‘accounting systems for managerial decisions and control can be traced back to the origins of hierarchical enterprises in the early nineteenth century’ (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987). In contrast, the case and conclusion presented in this paper hold that innovative measurements for decisions and control attributed to industrial revolution managers were adaptations of concepts used by auditors, stewards and bailiffs who, on behalf of lords of the manor, controlled agricultural activities on landed estates. In addition, evidence is presented which shows that concepts of production standards and standard costs were used in pre-industrial England to control the manufacture and sale of bread. Much of the evidence used to build the case was drawn from translations of medieval management, accounting and legal treatises and is presented under six headings. In each of the six sections evidence of the use of a progenitor of a modern management accounting concept and associated mensuration (action of measurement) is presented and discussed. The headings are: production capacity; production standards; standard costs; cost allocation; performance analysis; and relevant costs.

Good Help is Hard to Find: A Few Comments About Alcohol and Work in Preindustrial England

Alcohol was an accepted and at times necessary complement to work in preindustrial England. It enabled laborers to endure the hardship of performing manual labor for 12 or more hours a day, and additionally enabled them to endure extremes of heat and cold. Employers' attitudes toward drinking on the job tended to vary according to the availability of labor: when it was scarce, as it was from the second half of the fourteenth century until the end of the Middle Ages, employers had no choice but to tolerate fairly heavy drinking both on and off the job; when labor was plentiful, as it was throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods, employers sought to control recreational drinking, while continuing to tolerate strictly occupational drinking.

Urban demography in pre-industrial England: what is to be done?

For over thirty years demography has featured prominently on the urban history agenda. As long ago as 1963, in an article subtitled ‘On broadening the relevance and scope of urban history’, Eric Lampard emphasized that ‘An autonomous social history ought to begin with a study of population: its changing distribution in time and space’. In 1968 Leo Schnore suggested concentration upon ‘the demographic and ecological aspects of urban life’, according demography the number one priority. Leading British urban historians and historical geographers repeated such injunctions in the 1970s, emphasizing how little was known about even the most basic aspects of pre-industrial urban populations and how far British researchers lagged behind their continental colleagues in the field of urban demography. Unfortunately the response of the last generation of researchers to these precepts has been decidedly muted, and pre-industrial urban demography in England remains in its infancy.

Rural-Urban Migration of Women and their Employment in Towns

There has in recent years been a considerable focus on migration by historians. We now know far more about rural/urban migration patterns within Britain, both short term and long term. This is particularly so for the period since the mid nineteenth-century censuses. But evidence suggests that mobility, notably among the young and single, was very high from the seventeenth century. Long before the first censuses a steady flow of population from rural areas to towns and cities had begun. ‘Rural depopulation’, we are told, ‘is common to most mature industrial societies of the twentieth century’. In fact, experience of the last half century in the Third World, as well as in pre-industrial England, suggests such movement precedes the development of a ‘mature industrial society’. In parts of England, it was the ‘major urban phenomenon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’. Many areas of the Third World have experienced very rapid urbanisation particularly since 1950 when the vast majority of the population still lived in rural areas.

Female Householding in Late Eighteenth-Century America and the Problem of Poverty

Families in early modern England were more than twice as likely to be headed by a woman as were white households in late eighteenth-century America. On average, in a preindustrial English community, women headed between one-sixth and one-fifth of all households. In the United States in 1790, by contrast, less than one-thirteenth had female household heads or householders.1 The incidence of female householding provides an important window on preindustrial American society. Its magnitude and ramiScations deserve analysis and discussion for at least four reasons. First, householder was a significant status, particularly because households were very important units of social and economic life in the preindustrial era. Householders served as the directors of the predominant institution of economic production. While not a primary category in thinking about the family, householding nevertheless was a consequence of other statuses that mattered more centrally, at least for men. Since newlywed couples established households, becoming a head (and wives were considered co-heads, especially with respect to matters that were internal to the household) conveyed independence from the control of parents. Indeed, the contrast between autonomy and dependence was at the heart of legal definitions and other perceptions of social roles in early modern Anglo-America. The category of female household heads thus is crucial for assessing one critical arena of social autonomy for women.2 Second, like their current counterparts, women who were particularly likely to head households in preindustrial England and America also were disproportionately prone to be impoverished. Consequently they were subjects for support from and intervention by agents beyond the household: informal aid from kin, charity from private individuals or voluntary groups, and poor relief from public authorities. As the wages and assets of these female household heads were lower than those enjoyed by male family heads, on average they were closer to poverty. Additionally, as women householders frequently had responsibility for the support of minor children, they shared their meager incomes with others, increasing the numbers facing poverty. A heterogeneous group, women who headed households had some stability of residence and thus status in the community. Some were even widows of means, who had the inherited resources and practical skills to support themselves and their families comfortably. But for many women familially unattached to the households of husbands or fathers, private troubles became, in many instances, public problems. The study of the incidence of female-headed households proS vides an indirect entry into the analysis of one large segment of the population of the poor of preindustrial society, a portion that was relatively larger in England than in America.

Disputed Pleasures: Sport and Society in Preindustrial England.

Disputed Pleasures: Sport and Society in Preindustrial England.

Disputed Pleasures: Sport and Society in Preindustrial England. By Thomas S. Hendricks. Greenwood Press, 1991. 208 pp. $45.00

Disputed Pleasures: Sport and Society in Preindustrial England. By Thomas S. Hendricks. Greenwood Press, 1991. 208 pp. $45.00

The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c. 1500-c. 1800.

How did our ancestors die? Whereas in our own day the subject of death is usually avoided, in pre-Industrial England the rituals and processes of death were present and immediate. People not only surrounded themselves with memento mori, they also sought to keep alive memories of those who had gone before. This continual confrontation with death was enhanced by a rich culture of visual artefacts. In "The Art of Death", Nigel Llewellyn explores the meanings behind an astonishing range of these artefacts, and describes the attitudes and practices which lay behind their production and use. Illustrated and explained in this book are an array of little-known objects and images such as death's head spoons, jewels and swords, mourning-rings and fans, wax effigies, church monuments, Dance of Death prints, funeral invitations and ephemera, as well as works by well-known artists, including Holbein, Hogarth and Blake.

The art of death: visual culture in the English death ritual, c. 1500-c. 1800

How did our ancestors die? Whereas in our own day the subject of death is usually avoided, in pre-Industrial England the rituals and processes of death were present and immediate. People not only surrounded themselves with memento mori, they also sought to keep alive memories of those who had gone before. This continual confrontation with death was enhanced by a rich culture of visual artefacts. In The Art of Death, Nigel Llewellyn explores the meanings behind an astonishing range of these artefacts, and describes the attitudes and practices which lay behind their production and use. Illustrated and explained in this book are an array of little-known objects and images such as death's head spoons, jewels and swords, mourning-rings and fans, wax effigies, church monuments, Dance of Death prints, funeral invitations and ephemera, as well as works by well-known artists, including Holbein, Hogarth and Blake.

Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England. London: Croom Helm, 1985. 212 pp. - Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 285 pp.

Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England. London: Croom Helm, 1985. 212 pp. - Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 285 pp. - Volume 39

Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as mothers in pre-industrial England, Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine, London and New York, Routledge, 1990, 8vo, pp. xvii, 225, £35.00. - Katherine Arnup, Andree Levesque, and Ruth Roach Pierson (eds.), Delivering motherhood: maternal ideologies and practices in the 19th and 20th centuries, London and New York, Routledge, 1990, 8vo, pp. xxv, 322, illus.,

Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as mothers in pre-industrial England, Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine, London and New York, Routledge, 1990, 8vo, pp. xvii, 225, £35.00. - Katherine Arnup, Andree Levesque, and Ruth Roach Pierson (eds.), Delivering motherhood: maternal ideologies and practices in the 19th and 20th centuries, London and New York, Routledge, 1990, 8vo, pp. xxv, 322, illus., £30.00. - Volume 35 Issue 1

Valerie Fildes, editor. Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren. (The Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine.) New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall. 1990. Pp. xvii, 225. $65.00.

Valerie Fildes, editor. Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren. (The Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine.) New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall. 1990. Pp. xvii, 225. $65.00. - Volume 23 Issue 1

Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England.

Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England.

The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England.

Horses played a vital role in the economy of pre-industrial England. They acted as draught animals, pulled ploughs, waggons and coaches, worked machines, and transported goods around the country. As saddle animals they enabled their riders to carry out a wide variety of tasks, and at all levels of society they were regarded as status symbols in a unique relationship with man shared by no other animal. During the Tudor and Stuart period, horses were needed in ever-growing numbers, and for a greater variety of tasks. As demand grew, improvements became necessary in the means of supply and distribution. The agents of change, the specialist dealers, were often condemned as rogues and cheats, whose actions raised prices and caused shortages. Dr Edwards argues that, far from being generally unscrupulous, the dealers were no better or worse than those amongst whom they lived and worked.

Leaving Home and Living Alone: An Historical Perspective

This paper provides a temporal and spatial perspective on a variety of household forms in present-day Europe. Compared with the situation in pre-industrial England, many more people now live on their own but there are some surprising continuities in household forms. Notably, pre-industrial households were no more likely than present-day ones to include distant relatives, and the recent rise in the proportion of one-person families has simply returned the position to that produced by early widowhood in the seventeenth century. Nor has the general increase during recent decades in the proportion of one-person households reduced the variation within Europe in the frequency of living alone which remains much less likely in southern and parts of eastern Europe than in western Europe and Scandinavia. A more thorough comparative exercise is hampered by inconsistencies in the design of tables used to illustrate household types in different countries, and it is suggested that a standard set of tables should be agreed and produced for different national populations.