Economic arrangements of Romanies are complexly related to their social position. The authors of this volume explore these complexities, including how economic exchanges forge key social relationships of gender and ethnicity, how economic opportunities are constructed and seized, and how economic success and failure are transformed into attributes of social persons. They explore how, despite — or perhaps because of — their unstable and ambiguous position within the market economy, shared today with a growing number of people facing precarity and informalisation, Roma and Gypsy communities continuously re-create more or less viable economic strategies. The ethnographically based chapters share accounts of socially and economically vulnerable populations that face their situation with self-determination and creativity.

This book offers the first intellectual biography of the Anglo Australian economist, Colin Clark. Despite taking the economics world by storm with a mercurial ability for statistical analysis, Clark’s work has been largely overlooked in the 30 years since his death. His career was punctuated by a number of firsts. He was the first economist to derive the concept of GNP, the first to broach development economics and to foresee the re-emergence of India and China within the global economy. In 1945, he predicted the rise and persistence of inflation when taxation levels exceeded 25 per cent of GNP. And he was also the first economist to debunk post-war predictions of mass hunger by arguing that rapid population growth engendered economic development. Clark wandered through the fields of applied economics in much the same way as he rambled through the English countryside and the Australian bush. His imaginative wanderings qualify him as the eminent gypsy economist for the 20th century.

This book, first published in 1974, analyses the position of the Gypsies in Britain in the twentieth century, and assesses its significance in their overall history. Two dramatic shifts in Government policy towards the Gypsies are examined – in the 1880s and the 1960s – as are the changes in the stereotype of the ‘true Gypsy’. Dr Acton traces the developments of attitudes and economic conditions that gave rise to the 1970s increase in interest in Gypsies, and discusses the concomitant political and pressure group activity. He gives an account of the historical background to modern Gypsy politics; describes the postwar situation of the Gypsies in England and Wales, including pro-Gypsy pressure group activity up to 1965, and goes on to cover the campaigns of the Gypsy Council, including a sociological assessment of its work. He considers these aspects of Gypsy life in the light of modern sociological theory on minorities and race relations.

Includes statistics.

The first monograph to be published on Gypsies in Britain using the perspective of social anthropology.

Providing a guide to the ideas, arguments and history of the discipline, this volume discusses human social and cultural life in all its diversity and difference. Theory, ethnography and history are combined in over 230 entries on topics