"A wide survey over four millennia is possible for quarrying tools and techniques because of their simplicity and long-lived traditions. The chief contribution of the Romans was their organisation of the stone trade by mass production, standardisation and long-distance transport. Indeed, in post-Roman Europe, especially in Britain, it was the excellence of Roman building stone which allowed so much subsequent 'quarrying' in the buildings themselves. One exception in Saxon times was the quarry for Bradford-on-Avon's church. With the 12th-century spurt in church building activity, however, natural stone quarries once more became common and distribution methods familiar to the Roman world re-emerged." - COPAC.

Egypt, with its ever-growing wealth of evidence from the papyri, has in recent decades been one of the liveliest areas of scholarship on the later Roman Empire. This volume collects two dozen articles on the social, economic, and administrative history of Egypt by Roger Bagnall, whose book 'Egypt in Late Antiquity' has helped to bring this region and this evidence into the mainstream of historical debate. In these studies some of the main themes of his work are visible, in particular attempts to explore the possibilities for quantifying not only questions like the burden of taxation or the distribution of land-ownership, but more tantalizing and controversial matters like the rate at which the population of Egypt was Christianized.

International migration presents the human face of globalization, with consequences that make headlines throughout the world. The Cross-Border Connection addresses a paradox at the core of this phenomenon: emigrants departing one society become immigrants in another, tying those two societies together in a variety of ways. In nontechnical language, Roger Waldinger explains how interconnections between place of origin and destination are built and maintained and why they eventually fall apart. “When are immigrants ‘us’? When are they ‘them’? Waldinger implores readers to reframe the debate from a before-after dichotomy to a new transnational approach, revealing migrants to be here, there, and in-between at all stages of their migration tenure...The book’s real strength is in the elegance of the author’s argument, supported by evidence that transnationalism itself is not static but an ongoing dialectic.” —R. A. Harper, Choice “The Cross-Border Connection is to be commended for putting substance into the black box of transnationalism, offering scholars a dynamic model to account for the ebb and flow of transnationalism in the real world and yielding testable propositions about the circumstances under which cross-border connections can be expected to expand or contract.” —Douglas S. Massey, American Journal of Sociology

The second volume in a major new initiative in the study of local history, From Family History to Community History explores population movements, spatial divisions and social structures in town and countryside, and gives pointers as to the meaning of "community." Regional settings, the idea of "place," and changes over time are also examined, with special attention being paid to the patterns and the processes of all forms of migration. These themes give rise to new research ideas in family and community history.

This work is a sequel to The Irish Victorian City. As a collection of national and regional studies, it reflected the consensus view of the subject by describing both the degree of the demoralization of the Irish immigrants into Britain for the early and mid-Victorian period, when they figured so largely in the official parliamentary and social reportage of the day; and then, in spite of every obvious difficulty posed by poverty, crime, disease, and prejudice, the positive aspect of the Irish Catholic achievement in the creation of enduring religious and political communities towards the end of the nineteenth century.