The English countryside in the nineteenth century experienced the shifting power struggle from the great landed estates towards democratisation. Challenging received scholarship that the landed estates declined in power and patronage, Bujak places the Victorian globalisation of trade alongside the democratisation of the English countryside. By doing so, he reveals that the economic decline of the great landed estates was balanced by their continued social and political influence in the countryside up to the Great War. With its focus on Suffolk, a county at the forefront of agricultural improvement and thus hardest hit by the agricultural depression, the patterns revealed by "England's Rural Realm" demonstrates the durability of the great estate system across the English countryside.

This engaging history of rural England and Wales during the twentieth century looks at the role of the countryside as both a place of work and of leisure and looks at the many crises it has suffered during that time.

If one counts the production of constitutional documents alone, the nineteenth century can lay claim to being a 'constitutional age'; one in which the generation and reception of constitutional texts served as a centre of gravity around which law and politics consistently revolved. This volume critically re-examines the role of constitutionalism in that period, in order to counter established teleological narratives that imply a consistent development from absolutism towards inclusive, participatory democracy. Various aspects of constitutional histories within and outside of Europe are examined from a comparative, transnational, and multidisciplinary historical perspective, organized around five key themes. The first part looks at constitutions as anti-revolutionary devices, and addresses state building, monarchical constitutionalism, and restorations. The second part takes up constitutions and the justification of new social inequalities, focusing on women's suffrage, human rights, and property. The third part uses individual country studies to take on questions of how constitutions served to promote nationalism. The use of constitutions as instruments of imperialism is covered in the fourth part, and the final part examines the ways that constitutions function simultaneously as legal and political texts. These themes reflect a certain scepticism regarding any easy relationship between stated constitutional ideals and enacted constitutional practices. Taken together, they also function as a general working hypothesis about the role of constitutions in the establishment and maintenance of a domestically and internationally imbalanced status quo, of which we are the present-day inheritors. More particularly, this volume addresses the question of the extent to which nineteenth-century constitutionalism may have set the stage for new forms of domination and discrimination, rather than inaugurating a period of 'progress' and increasing equality.

The incredible tale of how ambitious oil rivals Marcus Samuel, Jr., and Henri Deterding joined forces to topple the Standard Oil empire Marcus Samuel, Jr., is an unorthodox Jewish merchant trader. Henri Deterding is a take-no-prisoners oilman. In 1889, John D. Rockefeller is at the peak of his power. Having annihilated all competition and possessing near-total domination of the market, even the U.S. government is wary of challenging the great “anaconda” of Standard Oil. The Standard never loses—that is until Samuel and Deterding team up to form Royal Dutch Shell. A riveting account of ambition, oil, and greed, Breaking Rockefeller traces Samuel’s rise from outsider to the heights of the British aristocracy, Deterding’s conquest of America, and the collapse of Rockefeller’s monopoly. The beginning of the twentieth century is a time when vast fortunes were made and lost. Taking readers through the rough and tumble of East London’s streets, the twilight turmoil of czarist Russia, to the halls of the British Parliament, and right down Broadway in New York City, Peter Doran offers a richly detailed, fresh perspective on how Samuel and Deterding beat the world’s richest man at his own game.