Fifty years after the beginning of the debate about the "general crisis of the seventeenth century," and thirty years after theodore K. Rabb's reformulation of it as the "European struggle for stability." this volume returns to the fundamental questions raised by the long-running discussion: What continent-wide patterns of change can be discerned in European history across the centuries from the Renaissance to the French Revolution? What were the causes of the revolts that rocked so many countries between 1640 and 1660? Did fundamental changes occur in the relationship between politics and religion? Politics and military technology? Politics and the structures of intellectual authority?

State, Economy and the Great Divergence provides a new analysis of what has become the central debate in global economic history: the 'great divergence' between European and Asian growth. Focusing on early modern China and Western Europe, in particular Great Britain, this book offers a new level of detail on comparative state formation that has wide-reaching implications for European, Eurasian and global history. Beginning with an overview of the historiography, Peer Vries goes on to extend and develop the debate, critically engaging with the huge volume of literature published on the topic to date. Incorporating recent insights, he offers a compelling alternative to the claims to East-West equivalence, or Asian superiority, which have come to dominate discourse surrounding this issue. This is a vital update to a key issue in global economic history and, as such, is essential reading for students and scholars interested in keeping up to speed with the on-going debates.

Written in a lively and engaging style, and designed to be accessible to a broader audience, this collection combines new research with the latest scholarship to provide a fresh and invigorating introduction to the revolutionary period that transformed Britain and its empire. There has been an explosion of interest in the 'Glorious' Revolution in recent years. Long regarded as the lesser of Britain's seventeenth-century revolutions, a faint after tremor following the major earthquake of mid-century, itis now coming to be seen as a major transformative episode in its own right, a landmark event which marked a distinctive break in British history. This collection sheds new light on the final crisis of the Stuart monarchy by re-examining the causes and implications of the dynastic shift of 1688-9 from a broad chronological, intellectual and geographical perspective. Comprising eleven essays by specialists in the field, it ranges from the 1660s to the mid-eighteenth century, deals with the history of ideas as well as political and religious history, and not only covers England, Scotland and Ireland but also explores the Atlantic and European contexts. Encompassing high politics and low politics, Tory and Whig political thought, and the experiences of both Catholics and Protestants, it ranges from protest and resistance to Jacobitism and counter-revolution and even offers an evaluation of British attitudes towards slavery. Written in a lively and engaging style and designed to be accessible to a broader audience, it combines new research with the latest scholarship to provide a fresh and invigorating introduction to the revolutionary period that transformed Britain and its empire. TIM HARRIS is Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European History at Brown University STEPHEN TAYLOR is Professor in the History of Early Modern England and Head of Department at Durham University.

A comparative survey of the emergence and development of Parliaments in Catholic Christendom from the thirteenth century, the chief focus of this work is the period between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries,when Europe was dramatically changed by the Renaissance, the Reformation and the growth of composite monarchies which brought together diverse territories under their rule. European Parliaments experienced a variety of challenges, fortunes and fates: some survived, even flourished, but others succumbed to powerful monarchies. By investigating the powers and privileges and responsibilities of these institutions, Graves illuminates the whole business of government - the nature of executive power, the relations of ruler and ruled, the restraints of consent, and the realities of the tension between central authority and local custom.

"Taking on nothing less than the formation of modern genders and sexualities, Thomas A. King develops a history of the political and performative struggles that produced both normative and queer masculinities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result is a major contribution to gender studies, gay studies, and theater and performance history. The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750 traces the transition from a society based on alliance, which had subordinated all men, women, and boys to higher ranked males, to one founded in sexuality, through which men have embodied their claims to personal and political privacy. King proposes that the male body is a performative production marking men's resistance to their subjection within patriarchy and sovereignty. Emphasizing that categories of gender must come under historical analysis, The Gendering of Men explores men's particpation in an ongoing struggle for access to a universal manliness transcending other biological and social differentials."--Pub. desc. v.1.

In this path-breaking study, first published in 2000, Jonathan Scott argues that seventeenth-century English history was shaped by three processes. The first was destructive: that experience of political instability which contemporaries called 'our troubles'. The second was creative: its spectacular intellectual consequence in the English revolution. The third was reconstructive: the long restoration voyage toward safe haven from these terrifying storms. Driving the troubles were fears and passions animated by European religious and political developments. The result registered the impact upon fragile institutions of powerful beliefs. One feature of this analysis is its relationship of the history of events to that of ideas. Another is its consideration of these processes across the century as a whole. The most important is its restoration of this extraordinary English experience to its European context.

Focusing on the concepts of popular consent, representation, limit, and resistance to tyranny as essential features of modern theories of parliamentary democracy, Monahan shows a continuity in use of these concepts across the alleged divide between the Mi

The volume begins with a study by Douglass C. North that emphasizes the economic and social factors that encouraged the development of freedom in the West and inhibited its development in other societies, notably China. The Greeks first devised civil and political liberty, and also were the first to have a word, eleutheria, for the concept. Martin Ostwald traces the history of the word over the course of Greek history, seeking when and why it assumed a meaning similar to freedom. Brian Tierney demonstrates how the medieval Church, by perpetuating Roman traditions of popular election and inspiring representative government, was vital to the development of modern freedom. The earliest secular institutions to follow the example of the Church in shaping their own governments were the towns of Italy, and John Hine Mundy shows how the towns served as the initial training grounds for laymen in the practice of free government. Monarchs whose coffers were depleted by continuous warfare sought to tap the resources of the wealthy towns and better-off rural residents, but these long-independent groups were not easily bullied and gathered their representatives together to negotiate taxation and grievances. In two chapters, H. G. Koenigsberger traces this background of parliaments and estates from all over Europe from the thirteenth century through the early modern era. In seventeenth-century England, parliamentary legislation would become the major vehicle for protecting the liberties of the subject. Before that, however, the common law courts were the main arena for advancing freedom, as J. H. Baker shows in his examination of the key developments in the common law. Traditionally, the Renaissance and the Reformation have been looked upon as largely separate phenomena. William J. Bouwsma asserts that in fact they were closely linked, with profound consequences for the shaping of modern freedom. Donald R. Kelley discusses the various forms and justifications of resistance that arose against the powerful monarchies that had emerged from the chaos and confusion of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.