This interesting study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Plays discussed include Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens, Jonson's The Alchemist and Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts. They are paired with writings by and about the finances of the corrupt Earl of Suffolk, the privateer Walter Raleigh, the royal agent Thomas Gresham, theatre entrepreneur James Burbage, and the Lord Treasurer Lionel Cranfield. Leinwand's new readings of these texts reveal a blend of affect and cognition concerning finance that includes nostalgia, anger, contempt, embarrassment, tenacity, bravado and humility.

Banking, Projecting, and Politicking uncovers a previously understudied and unacknowledged financial institution in late-seventeenth-century England known as Thompson and Company. Whilst the institution has been briefly mentioned in literary studies focusing on the poet and politician Andrew Marvell, it has never been the sole focus of an economic, financial, commercial, or political study in its own right. As such, nothing is known of how it operated, where it sits in the history of English finance, why it collapsed, or what it can tell us about wider Restoration society and its economic and political culture. Through a microhistorical study, the book reconstructs the institution of Thompson and Company, the social networks of its partners, the identity of its creditors, and the events and circumstances that led to its collapse. The book situates the reconstructed institution within its economic, commercial, financial, and political contexts, using the evidence accrued to question the traditional narrative of financial and commercial development, credit systems, the relationship between economics, finance, commerce and politics, and the place of risk and strategy in gendered relations, credit, and social status. The book will be of interest to academics and students in economic history, financial and business history.

‘Big data’ is now readily available to economic historians, thanks to the digitisation of primary sources, collaborative research linking different data sets, and the publication of databases on the internet. Key economic indicators, such as the consumer price index, can be tracked over long periods, and qualitative information, such as land use, can be converted to a quantitative form. In order to fully exploit these innovations it is necessary to use sophisticated statistical techniques to reveal the patterns hidden in datasets, and this book shows how this can be done. A distinguished group of economic historians have teamed up with younger researchers to pilot the application of new techniques to ‘big data’. Topics addressed in this volume include prices and the standard of living, money supply, credit markets, land values and land use, transport, technological innovation, and business networks. The research spans the medieval, early modern and modern periods. Research methods include simultaneous equation systems, stochastic trends and discrete choice modelling. This book is essential reading for doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in business, economic and social history. The case studies will also appeal to historical geographers and applied econometricians.

One of the most persistent, powerful, and dangerous notions in the history of the Jews in the diaspora is the prodigious talent attributed to them in all things economic. From the medieval Jewish usurer through the early-modern port-Jew and court-Jew to the grand financier of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary investors, Jews loom large in the economic imagination. For capitalists and Marxists, libertarians and radical reformers, Jews are intertwined with the economy. This association has become so natural that we often overlook the history behind the making and remaking of the complex cluster of perceptions about Jews and economy, which emerged within different historical contexts to meet a variety of personal and societal anxieties and needs. In An Economy of Strangers, Avinoam Yuval-Naeh historicizes this association by focusing on one specific time and place—the financial revolution that England underwent from the late seventeenth century that coincided with the reestablishment of the Jewish population there for the first time in almost four hundred years. European Christian societies had to that point shunned finance and constructed a normative system to avoid it, relying on the figure of the Jew as a foil. But as the economy modernized in the seventeenth century, finance became the hinge of national power. Finance’s rise in England provoked intense national debates. Could financial economy, based on lending money on interest, be accommodated within Christian state and society when it had previously been understood as a Jewish practice? By projecting the modern economy and the Jewish community onto each other, the Christian majority imbued them with interrelated meanings. This braiding together of parallel developments, Yuval-Naeh argues, reveals in a meaningful way how the contemporary and wide-ranging association of Jews with the modern economy could be created.

A comprehensive study of the business community in a pre-industrial economy.

"Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 explores how the public stage represented the city of London in the opening half of the seventeenth century. Drawing on a wide range of familiar and little-studied plays from four decades of a defining era of theater history. Theater of a City shows how the stage shaped and responded to the changing face of early modern London."--BOOK JACKET.

This book stresses the role of lesser traders, including women, in the distribution of goods around the Atlantic world 1760-1810. Networks of people, credit and goods bound the British-Atlantic trading community together despite the many crises of this period.

Publisher Description

Focusing on early modern plays which stage encounters between peoples of different cultures, this book asks how a sense of geographical location was created in early modern theatres that featured minimal scenery. While previous studies have stressed these plays' connections to a historical Mediterranean in which England was increasingly involved, this volume demonstrates how their dramatic geography was shaped through a literary and theatrical heritage. Reading canonical plays including The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Malta, and The Tempest alongside lesser-known dramas such as Soliman and Perseda, Guy of Warwick, and The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Dramatic Geography illustrates how early modern dramatists staging foreign worlds drew upon a romance tradition dating back to the medieval period, and how they responded to one another's plays to create an 'intertheatrical geography'. These strategies shape the plays' wider meanings in important ways, and could only have operated within the theatrical environment peculiar to early modern London: one in which playwrights worked in close proximity, in one instance perhaps even living together while composing Mediterranean dramas, and one where they could expect audiences to respond to subtle generic and intertextual negotiations. In reassessing this group of plays, Laurence Publicover brings into conversation scholarship on theatre history, cultural encounter, and literary geography; the book also contributes to current debates in early modern studies regarding the nature of dramatic authorship, the relationship between genre and history, and the continuities that run between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.