Europe in the nineteenth century saw spectacular growth in the size and number of cities and in the proportion of the population living in urban areas. Many contemporaries thought that this social revolution would bring about an equally dramatic change in religious life. This book, written by an international team of specialists, provides an authoritative account of religious change, both at the institutional and popular level, in Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox cities, in seven European countries.

First published in 1980, this book looks at the social structure of 18th and 19th century rural Britain. It is particularly concerned with the relationship of landlord and peasant in the rural village and examines the open-closed model of English rural social structure in great depth. In doing so, it explores the ways in which the estate system influenced urban development and how the peasant system facilitated the industrialisation of many villages. This book will be of particular interest to students of Victorian and social history, industrialisation and urbanisation.

With the onset of a more conservative political climate in the 1980s, social and especially labour history saw a decline in the popularity that they had enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This led to much debate on its future and function within the historical discipline as a whole. Some critics declared it dead altogether. Others have proposed a change of direction and a more or less exclusive focus on images and texts. The most constructive proposals have suggested that labour history in the past concentrated too much on class and that other identities of working people should be taken into account to a larger extent than they had been previously, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity. Although class as a social category is still as valid as it has been before, the questions now to be asked are to what extent non-class identities shape working people's lives and mentalities and how these are linked with the class system. In this volume some of the leading European historians of labour and the working classes address these questions. Two non-European scholars comment on their findings from an Indian, resp. American, point of view. The volume is rounded off by a most useful bibliography of recent studies in European labour history, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity.

The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain argues that British evangelicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries invented new methods of spreading the gospel, as well as new forms of personal religious practice, by exploiting the era's growth of urbanization, industrialization, consumer goods, technological discoveries, and increasingly mobile populations. While evangelical faith has often been portrayed standing in inherent tension with the transitions of modernity, Joseph Stubenrauch demonstrates that developments in technology, commerce, and infrastructure were fruitfully linked with theological shifts and changing modes of religious life. This volume analyzes a vibrant array of religious consumer and material culture produced during the first half of the nineteenth century. Mass print and cheap mass-produced goods—from tracts and ballad sheets to teapots and needlework mottoes—were harnessed to the evangelical project. By examining ephemera and decorations alongside the strategies of evangelical publishers and benevolent societies, Stubenrauch considers often overlooked sources in order to take the pulse of "vital" religion during an age of upheaval. He explores why and how evangelicals turned to the radical alterations of their era to bolster their faith and why "serious Christianity" flowered in an industrial age that has usually been deemed inhospitable to it.

These two volumes elucidate the manner in which there emerged, on the North China plain, hierarchically structured, functionally specialized social institutions organized on a political and territorial basis during the second millennium b.c. They describe the way in which, during subsequent centuries, these institutes were diffused through much of the rest of North and Central China. Author Paul Wheatley equates the emergence of the ceremonial center, as evidenced in Shang China, with a functional and developmental stage in urban genesis, and substantiates his argument with comparative evidence from the Americas, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Yoruba territories. The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City seeks in small measure to help redress the current imbalance between our knowledge of the contemporary, Western-style city on the one hand, and of the urbanism characteristic of the traditional world on the other. Those aspects of urban theory which have been derived predominantly from the investigation of Western urbanism, are tested against, rather than applied to ancient China. The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City examines the cosmological symbolism of the Chinese city, constructed as a world unto itself. It suggests, with a wealth of argument and evidence, that this cosmo-magical role underpinned the functional unity of the city everywhere, until new bases for urban life began to develop in the Hellenistic world. Whereas the majority of previous investigations into the nature of the Chinese city have been undertaken from the standpoint of elites, The Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City has adopted a point of view closer to that of the social scientist than the geographer. Paul Wheatley was professor and chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He was most famous for his work dealing with comparative urban civilization. Some of his books include The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, 7th to 10th Centuries; Nagara and Commandery, Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Traditions; and The Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore (with K. S. Sandhu).

Consumption is well established as a key theme in the study of the eighteenth century. Spaces of Consumption brings a new dimension to this subject by looking at it spatially. Taking English towns as its scene, this inspiring study focuses on moments of consumption – selecting and purchasing goods, attending plays, promenading – and explores the ways in which these were related together through the spaces of the town: the shop, the theatre and the street. Using this fresh form of analysis, it has much to say about sociability, politeness and respectability in the eighteenth century.