Immigration is not only a modern-day debate. Major change in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a surge of political and religious refugees moving across the continent. Estimates suggest that from 1550 to 1585 around 50,000 Dutch and Walloons from the southern Netherlands settled in England, and in the late seventeenth century 50,000 Huguenots from France followed suit. The majority gravitated towards London which, already a magnet for merchants and artisans across the centuries, began a process of major transformation. New skills, capital, technical know-how and social networks came with these migrants and helped to spark London's cosmopolitan flair and diversity. But the early experience of many of these immigrants in London was one of hostility, serving to slow down the adoption and expansion of new crafts and technologies. Immigrants and the Industries of London, 1500-1700 examines the origins and the changing face and shape of many trades, crafts and skills in the capital in this transformative period. It focuses on three crafts in particular: silk weaving, beer brewing and the silver trade, crafts which had relied heavily on foreign skills in the 16th century and had become major industries in the capital by the 18th century. Each craft was established by a different group of immigrants, distinguished not only by their social backgrounds, social organisation, identity, motives, migration pattern and experience and links with their home country but also by the nature of their reception, assimilation and economic contribution. Change was a protracted process in the London of the day. Immigrants endured inferior status, discrimination and sometimes exclusion, and this affected both their ability to integrate and their willingness to share trade secrets. And resistance by the English population meant that the adoption of new skills often took a long time - in some cases more than three centuries - to complete. The book places the adoption of new crafts and technologies in London within a broader European context, and relates it to the phenomenal growth of the metropolis and technological developments within these specific trades. It throws new perspectives on the movement of skills from Europe and the transmission of know-how from the immigrant population to English artisans. The book explores how, through enterprise and persistence, the immigrants' contribution helped transform London from a peripheral and backward European city to become the workshop of the world by the nineteenth century. By way of conclusion the book brings the current immigration debate full circle to examine the lessons we can draw from this early-modern experience.

Archaeologists and textile historians bring together 16 papers to investigate the production, trade and consumption of textiles in Scandinavia and across parts of northern and Mediterranean Europe throughout the medieval period. Archaeological evidence is used to demonstrate the existence or otherwise of international trade and to examine the physical characteristics of textiles and their distribution in order to understand who was producing, using and trading them and what they were being used for. Historical evidence, mainly textual, is employed to link textile names to places, numbers and prices and thus provide an appreciation of changing economics, patterns of distribution and the organisation of trade. Different types and qualities of cloths are discussed and the social implications of their production and import/export considered against a developing background of urbanism and increasing commercial wealth.

Capitalism is central to our understanding of contemporary economic and political life and yet what does it really mean? If, as has now been shown to be the case, capital and property rights existed in pre-modern and pre-capitalist societies, what is left of our understanding of capitalism? Steven G. Marks' provocative new book calls into question everything we thought we knew about capitalism, from the word's very origins and development to the drivers of Western economic growth. Ranging from the Middle Ages to the present, The Information Nexus reveals that the truly distinctive feature of capitalism is business's drive to acquire and analyze information, supported by governments that allow unfettered access to public data. This new interpretation of capitalism helps to explain the rise of the West, puts our current information age into historical perspective, and provides a benchmark for the comparative assessment of economic systems in today's globalized environment.

War, Power and the Economy contains a comparative history of Great Britain, France and Spain, the three rival empires of the 1700s. It explores how the states prepared for war, what kind of economic means they had, what institutional changes they implemented, and how efficient this was. As such, the book presents the first comparative synthesis aiming to understand the outcome of the global confrontation in the eighteenth century. Faced with the challenge of paying for new and more costly wars, some countries found flexible ways to get more money and better supplies, whereas others did not. The development of freer colonial markets, the increase of consumption and its taxation, the problems of venal administration or the different systems of patronage with contractors, are some of the factors explaining the divergences that were made clear by 1815. This book explores political and economic dimensions of the eighteenth-century European state in order to explain why and how changes in power as an outcome of war depended upon the available means and the way they were obtained and used. The book takes the idea that making war or preparing for it obliged governments to make important changes in their institutions, so that during the eighteenth century the state in many ways formed itself through war efforts. Ultimately, this study aims to show how closely political and military success was entwined with economic interests. This volume is of great interest to those who study economic history, political economy and European history.

The long-running debate on Britain's apparent economic decline in the last 120 years (not exactly noticeable in the living standards of ordinary people, which have risen enormously in that time) has generated a large economic and statistical literature and a great deal of heat in rival social and cultural explanations. The 'decline' has been confidently attributed to the permeation of the business elite by the anti-industrial and anti-commercial attitudes communicated by public schools and the old universities through their propagation of aristocratic and gentry values; and the readiness of the buiness elite to be thus permeated has been ascribed to the persistent tendency of new men of wealth to transform themselves into landed gentlemen. There have been equally confident claims to have overturned this traditional view that wealthy merchants and industrialists sought to acquire landed estates and country houses, and to have established that 'gentlemanly values' were in fact economically advantageous to Britain because she never was a primarily industrial economy. In this book, Professor Thompson subjects these interpretations to the test of the actual evidence, and firmly re-establishes the conventional wisdom on the characteristic desire of new money to acquire land and a place in the country, an aspiration which continues to be manifest today. At the same time, he shows that aristocratic and gentry cultures have not by any means been consistently anti-industrial or anti-business, and that many of the businessmen-turned-landowners have in fact not turned their backs on industry, but have founded business dynasties. Gentrification has indeed occurred ona large scale over the last two hundred years, but has had no discernible effects one way or the other on Britain' economic performance.

This book explains how and why Belgium, a small but influential European country, was changed through its colonial activities in the Congo, from the first expeditions in 1880 to the Mobutu regime in the 1980s. Belgian politics, diplomacy, economic activity and culture were influenced by the imperial experience. Belgium and the Congo, 1885-1980 yields a better understanding of the Congo's past and present.