Queenship in Britain 1660-1837 looks at the lives of successive Queens, Princesses of Wales and royal daughters, and considers how they used their powers of patronage and operated within the confines of royal family politics. With contributions from an international group of scholars this book brings together new approaches in gender history and court studies to present a re-evaluation of this previously neglected area in the study of the British monarchy. An explanation of these new approaches is contained in a substantial introduction. While the essays perform detailed discussions on a variety of more specific subjects, from how the foreign and Catholic wives of the restored Stuarts coped with a libertine court and a Protestant nation, to the travails of Princesses of Wales, the marriage options of royal daughters, and the question of whether Queen Adelaide (wife of William IV) was a harmless philanthropist re-establishing royal respectability or a real political influence behind the throne.

Western policymakers, political activists and academics alike see patronage as the chief enemy of open, democratic societies. Patronage, for them, is a corrupting force, a hallmark of failed and failing states, and the obverse of everything that good, modern governance ought to be. South Asia poses a frontal challenge for this consensus. Here the world's most populous, pluralist and animated democracy is also a hotbed of corruption with persistently startling levels of inequality. Patronage as Politics in South Asia confronts this paradox with calm erudition: sixteen essays by anthropologists, historians and political scientists show, from a wide range of cultural and historical angles, that in South Asia patronage is no feudal residue or retrograde political pressure, but a political form vital in its own right. This volume suggests that patronage is no foe to South Asia's burgeoning democratic cultures, but may in fact be their main driving force.

This study of politics in early modern England uses the relations between provincial towns, the landed elite, and the crown to argue that the growth of personal connections and patronage, as much as of conflict, explains the development of early modern government. It shows how patronage was a vital tool that suited both local needs and the royal will.

This wide-ranging volume goes to the heart of the revisionist debate about the crisis of government that led to the English Civil War. The author tackles questions about the patronage that structured early modern society, arguing that the increase in royal bounty in the early seventeenth century redefined the corrupt practices that characterized early modern administration.