Belonging to a community – whether local, political, occupational or religious – was a vital part of ‘making-shift’ in early modern England. To be a ‘neighbour’ or ‘citizen’, rather than a ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner’, had a profound effect on one's economic situation. Likewise, gaining settlement in a parish or earning admission to a trade brought with it a range of important rights and privileges, whereas being officially branded as a ‘vagrant’ or ‘intruder’ could have dire consequences. All these economic communities were, in a sense, ‘imagined’, but they nonetheless had a potent influence on the dynamics of production and exchange. Of course, communities took many forms during this period. They varied in size from a single neighbourhood or fellowship to the entire nation or even the whole of humanity. Some had strong institutional structures to regulate the process of inclusion and exclusion while others existed only as a shared sense of common identity or communal solidarity. But whatever their size and complexity, each depended on a basic division between insiders and outsiders, between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Economic communities in early modern England have received a significant amount of scholarly attention and some recent studies – such as the explorations of urban and rural communities offered by Phil Withington, Joseph Ward, Steve Hindle, Naomi Tadmor, Keith Snell, and others – provide analysis worthy of emulation. Yet, some aspects of the historiography remain problematic. Specifically, for many decades this scholarship built on a simplistic model of decline – crudely summarised as a shift from ‘community’ to ‘society’, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft – inherited from nineteenth-century social theory.