Search Results

This book focuses on the way in which the Palestine Mandate was part of a broader British imperial administration — a fact often masked by Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. The book's research reveals clear links to colonial practice in India, Sudan, and Cyprus amongst other places. It argues that land officials’ views on sound land management were derived from their own experiences of rural England, and that this was far more influential on the shaping of land policies than the promise of a Jewish National Home. The book reveals how the British were intent on preserving the status quo of Ottoman land law, which (when few Britons could read Ottoman or were well grounded in its legal codes) led to a series of translations, interpretations, and hence new applications of land law. The sense of importance the British attributed to their work surveying and registering properties and transactions is captured in the efforts of British officials to microfilm all of their records at the height of the Second World War. Despite this, however, land policies remained in flux.

Exploring the role of credit is vital to understanding any economy. In the past two decades historians of many European regions have become increasingly aware that medieval credit, far from being the preserve of merchants, bankers, or monarchs, was actually of basic importance to the ordinary villagers who made up most of the population. This study is devoted to credit in rural England in the middle ages. Focusing in particular on seven well-documented villages, it examines in detail some of the many thousands of village credit transactions of this period, identifies the people who performed them, and explores the social relationships brought about by involvement in credit. The evidence comes primarily from inter-peasant debt litigation recorded in the proceedings of manor courts, which were the private legal jurisdictions of landlords. A comparative study that discusses the English evidence alongside findings from other parts of medieval and early modern Europe, the book argues that the prevailing view of medieval English credit as a marker of poverty and crisis is inadequate. In fact, the credit networks of the English countryside were surprisingly resilient in the face of the fourteenth-century crises associated with plague, famine, and economic depression.

This book is an important new scholarly study of the roots of capitalism. The author's penetrating examination of rural England in the 15th and 16th centuries asks how capitalist it was, and how and why it changed over the century and a half under scrutiny. Her book relates ideas of peasant society and capitalism to a local study of north-east Norfolk, a county that was to become one of the crucibles of the so-called agrarian revolution. The author uses the rich variety of historical sources produced by this precocious commercialized locality to examine a wide range of topics from the manorial system and serfdom, rights to land and the level of rent, the land market and inheritance, to the distribution of land and wealth, the numbers of landless, wage-earners, and rural craftsmen, servants, and the labour laws.

In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated twenty percent of all children born—most of them before the age of five. When the apathetic Tokugawa shogunate failed to respond, Japanese physicians, learned in Western medicine and medical technology, became the primary disseminators of Jennerian vaccination—a new medical technology to prevent smallpox. Tracing its origins from rural England, this book investigates the transmission of Jennerian vaccination to and throughout pre-Meiji Japan. Relying on Dutch, Japanese, Russian, and English sources, it treats Japanese physicians as leading agents of social and institutional change, showing how they used traditional strategies involving scholarship, marriage, and adoption to forge new local, national, and international networks in the first half of the nineteenth century. It details the appalling cost of Japan's almost 300-year isolation, and examines in depth a nation on the cusp of political and social upheaval.