The perils and dangers of these knights (and undead peasants): Interpreting English and Scottish Extent Rolls of 1297–1305

2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Donnelly
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Compte Rendu ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Sources

Medieval Scottish economic and social history has held little interest for a unionist establishment but, just when a recovery of historic independence begins to seem possible, this paper tackles a (perhaps the) key pre-1424 source. It is compared with a Rutland text, in a context of foreign history, both English and continental. The Berwickshire text is not, as was suggested in 2014, a ‘compte rendu’ but rather an ‘extent’, intended to cross-check such accounts. Read alongside the Rutland roll, it is not even a single ‘compte’ but rather a palimpsest of different sources and times: a possibility beyond earlier editorial imaginings. With content falling (largely) within the time-frame of the PoMS project (although not actually included), when the economic history of Scotland in Europe is properly explored, the sources discussed here will be key and will offer an interesting challenge to interpretation. And some surprises about their nature and date.

Cosmopolitan Capitalists and Colonial Rule. The business structure and corporate culture of the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., 1850s–1960s

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
CHRISTOF DEJUNG
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Social History ◽  
Corporate Culture ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Positive Interactions ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Private Company ◽  
European Firm ◽  
Business Goals ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article examines the history of the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., which was one of the most important exporters of Indian raw cotton and one of the biggest trading firms in South Asia during the colonial period. The study allows for a fresh look at Indian economic history by putting forth two main arguments. First, it charts the history of a continental European firm that was active in South Asia to offer a better understanding of the economic entanglements of the subcontinent with the wider world, which often had a reach beyond the empire. This ties in with recent research initiatives that aim to examine the history of imperialism from a transnational perspective. Second, the history of a private company helps in developing a micro-perspective on the often ambiguous relation between the business goals of individual enterprises and colonial rule. The article argues that this may be evidence of the fact that capitalism and imperialism were two different, although sometimes converging, spatial structures, each with a distinct logic of its own. What is more, the positive interactions between European and Indian businessmen, fostered by a cosmopolitan attitude among business elites, point to the fact that even in the age of empire, the class background of actors could be more important for the establishing of cooperative ventures than the colour of their skin or their geographical origin. It is argued that this offers the possibility of examining the history of world trade in terms of global social history.

Roman Terracotta Lamps: the Organization of an Industry

1980 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 126-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. V. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Material Sources ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Progress ◽  
Made In

It should be plain that important progress is to be made in the economic and social history of the Greco-Roman world through more systematic studies of the material remains. In the field of ancient manufacture and commerce, M. I. Finley has called for ‘a more sophisticated effort to approach quantification and pattern-construction’, and other historians too are well aware of what needs to be done. Doing it, however, can be difficult, for such projects, if approached with a scholarly desire for precision, bristle with complications, and the results can often be no more than tentative. Such is the case with this study of the terracotta lamp industry. For their part, the archaeologists who have studied groups of terracotta lamps, whether from particular sites or particular museums, have not altogether succeeded in fitting the material into the known framework of Roman life (this is not to suggest a primacy of written over material sources, simply that both are indispensable in economic history).

scholarly journals Height and the High Life: What Future for a Tall Story?

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Leunig ◽  
Hans-Joachim Voth
Keyword(s):  
Health Status ◽  
Family History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Reliable Indicator ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Developed World

This chapter discusses height as a reliable indicator of health status and standard of living. It also suggests that mapping from height to other measures of well-being has attracted the attention of economic historians. The history of heights may prove to be a useful means by which economic historians can better explain the past. The first area is social history, and in particular family history, in the developed world. The second is the economic history of those countries or areas with limited amounts of other data.

Social History in Serbia: The Association for Social History

2008 ◽  
Vol 34-35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 369-381
Author(s):  
Radina Vučetić ◽  
Olga Manojlović Pintar
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
The University

This review essay provides a brief overview of the research and publication activity of the Udruženje za društvenu istoriju/Association for Social History, an innovative scholarly organization established in 1998 in Belgrade, Serbia. The association promotes research on social history in modern South-Eastern Europe, with a focus on former Yugoslavia, and publishes scientific works and historical documents. The driving force behind the activity of the association is a group of young social historians gathered around Professor Andrej Mitrović, at the University of Belgrade. Prof. Mitrović’s work on the “social history of culture” has provided a scholarly framework for a variety of new works dealing with issues of modernization, history of elites, history of ideas, and the diffuse relationship between history and memory. Special attention is given to the Association’s journal, Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju/Annual for Social History, which published studies on economic history, social groups, gender issue, cultural history, modernization, and the history of everyday life in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Methodologically routed in social history, these research projects are interdisciplinary, being a joint endeavor of sociologists, art historians, and scholars of visual culture.

The maintenance, repair and construction of ships in the French Empire during the eighteenth century

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-611
Author(s):  
David Plouviez
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Construction Tasks ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Port Infrastructure

The history of maritime trade has been the subject of considerable research since the 1950s, but the technical artefacts of this trade have not received the attention they deserve. While historians have paid plenty attention to ships – their features, tonnage, etc. – and port infrastructure overseas, the issues relating to naval repair and construction in the Empires have rarely attracted interest. However, this is a key factor in understanding the dynamics of trade, which encompasses the interplay between economic history, social history and the history of technology. Drawing on the example of the French Empire, this article aims to provide a first approach to this economy of maintenance, repair and shipbuilding overseas. The first step is to identify the places where these complex tasks were carried out and to establish the temporality of equipment in overseas ports. Did the French Empire offer a network of ports equipped to maintain, repair and build ships? What equipment does this include? But while the question of infrastructure is crucial, insofar as it raises other issues related to the role of the State and its relationship with economic stakeholders, it is also essential to consider that a significant share of maintenance, repair and construction tasks were not associated with any specific infrastructure. The question of knowledge, know-how and their exchange within the Empires is also important and is the subject of the second part of this article. The aim is to demonstrate that the identification and breakdown of shipbuilding workers, the establishment of their occupational mobility and the technical discussions they engaged in with other Europeans, settlers or natives, provide challenging research opportunities that may help us to understand the maintenance, repair and construction of ships in the Empires.

New Tools for the Economic Historian

1941 ◽  
Vol 1 (S1) ◽  
pp. 30-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. A. J. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Single Industry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Wage Earners

Archeologists assure us that organized social life has existed on this earth for about two hundred and fifty thousand years. How millions of people have sought to satisfy their wants over this tremendous span of time is the acknowledged province of economic history. Yet, for lack of records, the gild of economic historians must, for the most part, confine their attention to the last one per cent of this time span; indeed the great bulk of research in economic history is devoted the last one-tenth of one per cent of the archeologists' two hundred and fifty thousand years of social history. Even then the economic historian is utterly overwhelmed with facts. He who essays to write the economic history of the United States, for example, must depict as best can the economic activities of people for more than a hundred and fifty years, farmers, merchants, manufacturers, wage-earners, rentiers; men, women and children in all walks of life, in all variety of occupations. The task is utterly staggering. An army of economic historians would be required to write a complete economic history of the United States; a regiment at least to write a faithful factual account of a single industry.

scholarly journals The Fabric of Transnational Political Activism: “Révolution Afrique” and West African Radical Militants in France in the 1970s

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 1172-1208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Philippe Dedieu ◽  
Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Transnational Activism ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
Return Policies ◽  
Political Group ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Boundaries

AbstractThis article locates itself at the intersection of the social history of postcolonial migrations and the intellectual history of leftism and Third-Worldism in the aftermath of May ’68. It is the first study of the radical political group Révolution Afrique. From 1972 until its ban by the French government in 1977, this organization forged by African and French activists mobilized against neocolonial ideologies and policies on both sides of the Mediterranean. By tracing the organization's rise and fall through extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, the article explores the changing meanings of transnational activism by weaving together the biographical paths of the activists, the institutional and political constraints they faced, and the ideological framework within which they operated. During this short time frame, the transnational agenda that made sense among African workers and students in the early 1970s became irrelevant. The increasing repression of political dissent in Africa and France, the suspension of migratory flows, and the French government's implementation of return policies in the late 1970s forced the group's African activists to adopt a more national approach to their actions, or simply withdraw from high-risk activism. Despite the dissolution of Révolution Afrique, this collective endeavor appears to have been a unique experience of political education for African activists, transcending distinct social and national boundaries that until now have been left unexamined by social scientists specialized in the complex history of the relationships between France and Africa.

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