Past & Present 

About: Past & Present is an academic journal published by Oxford University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Phased array & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 0031-2746. Over the lifetime, 2173 publications have been published receiving 65598 citations. The journal is also known as: Past and present.

The moral economy of the english crowd in the eighteenth century

Abstract: WE HAVE BEEN WARNED IN RECENT YEARS, BY GEORGE RUDE AND OTHERS, against the loose employment of the term \"mob\". I wish in this article to extend the warning to the term \"riot\", especially where the food riot in eighteenth-century England is concerned. This simple four-letter word can conceal what may be described as a spasmodic view of popular history. According to this view the common people can scarcely be taken as historical agents before the French Revolution. Before this period they intrude occasionally and

Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial europe

Abstract: General interpretations of the processes of long-term economic change in late medieval and early modern Europe have continued to be constructed almost exclusively in terms of what might loosely be called “objective” economic forces – in particular, demographic fluctuations and the growth of trade and markets. A variety of models have been constructed centring on these forces. But whatever the exact nature of the model, and whether the pressure for change is seen to arise from urbanization and the growth of trade or an autonomous demographic development, a market supply/demand mechanism is usually assumed to provide the elementary theoretical underpinnings. So, the response of the agrarian economy to economic pressures, whatever their source, is more or less taken for granted, viewed as occurring more or less automatically, in a direction economically determined by the “laws of supply and demand”. In the construction of these economic models, the question of class structure tends to be treated in a variety of ways. Typically, there is the statement that one is abstracting (for the moment) from the social or class structure for certain analytical purposes. The fact remains that in the actual process of explanation, that is in the application of the model to specific economic historical developments, class structure tends, almost inevitably, to creep back in. Sometimes, it is inserted, in an ad hoc way, to comprehend a historical trend which the model cannot cover. More often, however, consciously or unconsciously, class structure is simply integrated within the model itself, and seen as essentially shaped by, or changeable in terms of, the objective economic forces around which the model has been constructed in the first place.