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Look in most eighteenth-century newspapers and you will be struck by the number of notices for lost dogs, absconding apprentices and missing bank notes. The range of lost ‘things’ included in such notices might astound you. People advertised all sorts of missing items, from anchors to monkeys, keys, walking sticks and lumps of timber. They […]
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On 10 May 1570, at the chateau of Dieppe in Normandy, a cloth-merchant was interrogated about the contents of a basket he was carrying, including thirty notes and letters ‘concealed in a bed of straw under cheeses’. This chance interception piqued my curiosity about the wider context of this episode, from where and to where, […]
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In the mid-tenth century ce, two Muslim scholars were having a chat in Baghdad. One of them, called Ibn al-Jiʿābī, was well known to contemporaries as a fairly prolific author and historian, even if none of his works survive today. While these two scholars were chatting, a group of Shiʿa approached them and handed Ibn […]
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Labour precarity is an epidemic of our times. From the Arab Spring (2010-2012) to the Occupy Wall Street Movement (2011) and the more recent Yellow Vest Movement (since 2018), a key common thread has been widespread discontent rooted in labour precarity. In developing economies, labour precarity has long been the norm. In developed economies, labour […]
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A girl of around 11 or 12 is reading out a letter to her attentive elders. Why did I pick James Brenan’s ‘News From America’ to illustrate a history of Ireland that spans sixteen centuries? Why not pick a ring fort, a round tower, a monastic ruin, a seventeenth-century battle scene, a graceful eighteenth-century public […]
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General audiences are accustomed to imagining medieval culinary practices through those of the elites — in shows, films, and novels, where little attention is given to the habits of common people. Perhaps as a contrast to the material wealth of aristocrats, society tends to picture ordinary individuals from the Middle Ages as dirty and uncivilised, […]
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The field of South Asian economic history has changed dramatically since the publication of The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 2 (CEHI 2, 1983). CEHI 2 was a pathbreaking reference work when it appeared. But it was a largely descriptive narrative that avoided comparative analysis, theoretical debates, and historiography. Its exclusive focus on India, […]
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The aim of this book is to find some precision and a point of origin for the concept of capital and by doing that, therefore capitalism. It also challenges the merchant based London centric interpretation of the financial revolution, and argues that the socially and geographically broad based financial development it describes allowed industrialisation to […]
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