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Nineteenth-century Britain saw remarkable economic growth and a rise in real wages. But not everyone shared in the nation's wealth. Unable to earn a sufficient income themselves, working-class women were reliant on the ‘breadwinner wage’ of their husbands. When income failed, or was denied or squandered by errant men, families could be plunged into desperate poverty from which there was no escape. This book unlocks the homes of Victorian England to examine the lives — and finances — of the people who lived there. Drawing on over 600 working-class autobiographies, including more than 200 written by women, the book changes our understanding of daily life in Victorian Britain.

London is now a global financial and multicultural hub in which over three hundred languages are spoken. But the history of London has always been a history of immigration. This book explores the rich and vibrant story of London — from its founding two millennia ago by Roman invaders, to Jewish and German immigrants in the Victorian period, to the Windrush generation invited from Caribbean countries in the twentieth century. The book shows how migration has been fundamental to London's economic, social, political, and cultural development. The book sheds light on the various ways in which newcomers have shaped London life, acting as cheap labour, contributing to the success of its financial sector, its curry houses, and its football clubs. London's economy has long been driven by migrants, from earlier continental financiers and more recent European Union citizens. Without immigration, fueled by globalization, the book argues, London would not have become the world city it is today.

From the beginning, French revolutionaries imagined their transformation as a universal one that must include Muslims, Europe's most immediate neighbors. They believed in a world in which Muslims could and would be French citizens, but they disagreed violently about how to implement their visions of universalism and accommodate religious and social difference. Muslims, too, saw an opportunity, particularly as European powers turned against the new French Republic, leaving the Muslim polities of the Middle East and North Africa as France's only friends in the region. This book examines how Muslims came to participate in the political struggles of the revolution and how revolutionaries used Muslims in France and beyond as a test case for their ideals. The final chapter reveals how the French Revolution's fascination with the Muslim world paved the way to Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Egypt in 1798.

This book explores the subtle transformation of the coastal province of the Languedoc in the eighteenth century. Mining a wealth of archival sources, the book unveils how provincial elites and peasant households unwittingly created new practices. Managing local political institutions, establishing new credit systems, building networks of natural historians, and introducing new plants and farm machinery to the region opened up the inhabitants of the province to new norms and standards. The practices were gradually embedded in daily life and allowed the province to negotiate the new worlds of industrial society and capitalism.

In Regency England the eldest son usually inherited almost everything while his younger brothers, left with little inheritance, had to make a crucial decision: what should they do to make an independent living? This book begins with an exploration of the complicated relations between siblings during the Regency era, given the privileged position of the eldest son in the family. Not all gentlemen were rich; indeed, many had little money of their own and had to pursue a career. The eldest son would normally inherit the family estate, while the daughters and younger sons would receive no more than a start in life. Inequality was universal and taken for granted. The chapters discuss the career options for younger sons, often with bleak prospects. The book weaves together the stories of many obscure and well-known young men, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Regency society.

Plague remains the paradigm against which reactions to many epidemics are often judged. This book examines how a major city fought, suffered, and survived the impact of plague. Going beyond traditional oppositions between rich and poor, the book provides a nuanced and more compassionate interpretation of government policies in practice, by recreating the very human reactions and survival strategies of families and individuals. From the evocation of the overcrowded conditions in isolation hospitals to the splendor of religious processions, the book analyzes Florentine reactions within a wider European context to assess the effect of state policies on the city, street, and family. It unearths the forgotten stories of doctors and administrators struggling to cope with the sick and dying, and of those who were left bereft and confused by the sudden loss of relatives.

This book challenges the scholarly consensus that British India and the Second Empire were founded in “a fit of absence of mind.” The book instead argues that the origins of the Raj and the largest empire of the modern world were rooted in political conflicts and movements in Britain. It was British conservatives who shaped the Second Empire into one of conquest and dominion, emphasizing the extraction of resources and the subjugation of colonial populations. The book shows how the East India Company was transformed from a corporation into an imperial power in the service of British political forces opposed to the rising radicalism of the period. The Company's dominion in Bengal, where it raised territorial revenue and maintained a large army, was an autocratic bulwark of Britain's established order. The book offers an important new understanding of the era and its global ramifications.

What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, this book places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France's colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations. This book provides the first in-depth study of the Société, and demonstrates its legacy in scientific programs, academies, and the making of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie. Through insightful analysis of textual, visual, and material sources, the book provides a ground-breaking perspective on the politics of writing on the mechanical arts and the development of key Enlightenment concepts such as improvement, utility, and progress.

Prior histories of the first Spanish mariners to circumnavigate the globe in the sixteenth century have focused on Ferdinand Magellan and the other illustrious leaders of these daring expeditions. This book is the first to concentrate on the hitherto anonymous sailors, slaves, adventurers, and soldiers who manned the ships. The book contends that these initial transglobal voyages occurred by chance, beginning with the launch of Magellan's armada in 1519, when the crews dispatched by the king of Spain to claim the Spice Islands in the western Pacific were forced to seek a longer way home, resulting in bitter confrontations with rival Portuguese. The book's enthralling history, based on more than thirty years of research in European and American archives, offers fascinating stories of treachery, greed, murder, desertion, sickness, and starvation but also of courage, dogged persistence, leadership, and loyalty.

Spain’s infamous “false chronicles” were alleged to have been unearthed in 1595 in a monastic library deep in the heart of the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire by the Jesuit priest Jerónimo Román de la Higuera. Though rife with anachronisms and chronological inaccuracies, these four volumes of invented “truths” about Spanish sacred history radically transformed the religious landscape in Counter-Reformation Spain and were not definitively exposed as forgeries until centuries later, after nearly two hundred years of scholarly debate. This book explores the history, author, and legacy of one of the world’s most compelling and consequential frauds. The book examines how a relatively obscure Jesuit priest so successfully fabricated a set of supposedly historical documents that they were accepted as authentic for generation after generation. The chronicles’ influence was so powerful, in fact, that they continued to shape scholarly discourse, religious practice, and local heritage throughout Spain well into the twentieth century, despite having been debunked as forgeries in the eighteenth. This analysis brings together intellectual, cultural, religious, and political history while reinvigorating an ongoing debate on the uses and abuses of history and the nature of historical and religious truth.