What did people in Restoration England think the correct relationship between church and state should be? And how did this thinking evolve?

The death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey has baffled scholars and armchair detectives for centuries; this book offers compelling new evidence and, at last, a solution to the mystery.

A discussion of the fascinating interplay between communication, politics and religion in early modern England, suggesting a new framework for the politics of print culture.

This book examines how the form and function of the Covenants were shorn of religious implications and repurposed, serving a pluralistic vision of the role of religion in politics and public life.

This study examines relations between centre and localities in seventeenth-century England by looking at early Stuart government through the lens of provincial towns.

Examines the often overlooked political, social, and economic contexts in which painters in Tudor and Early Stuart England lived and worked.

This book provides a historical perspective of Scotland's interaction with the world beyond its borders.

What were the lives of Africans in provincial England like during the early modern period? How, where, and when did they arrive in rural counties? How were they perceived by their contemporaries?

Analyses the role of long-term continuities in the political and religious culture of Wales from the eve of the Civil War in 1640 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Far from the romanticised image of the swashbuckling genre of maritime history, the eighteenth-century Caribbean was a 'marchlands' in which violence was a way of life and where solidarities were transitory and highly volatile.

The first comprehensive, comparative study of the visual culture of monarchy in the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne

What did it mean to be a Covenanter?

Interactions between age groups were central to major social and cultural developments in eighteenth-century England, and this book serves as a powerful reminder that people lived through not in the past.

A reassessment of the impact of the Hanoverian succession.

The first comprehensive analysis of an extensive body of rogue pamphlets published in early modern London.

A detailed examination of the March system - the special administrative arrangements which applied on both sides of the border - how it was applied and how it evolved as national political circumstances changed.

Dynastic marriages mattered in early modern Europe: the creation of alliances and the outbreak of wars were tied to continental dynastic politics.

One of the most notable currents in social, cultural and political historiography is the interrogation of the categories of 'elite' and 'popular' politics and their relationship to each other, as wellas the exploration of why and how different sorts of people engaged with politics and behaved politically. While such issues are timeless, they hold a special importance for a society experiencing rapid political and social change, like early modern England. No one has done more to define these agendas for early modern historians than John Walter. His work has been hugely influential, and at itsheart has been the analysis of the political agency of ordinary people. The essays in this volume engage with the central issues of Walter's work, ranging across the politics of poverty, dearth and household, popular political consciousness and practice more broadly, and religion and politics during the English revolution. This outstanding collection, bringing together some of the leading historians of this period with some of the field's rising stars, will appeal to anyone interested in the social, cultural and political history of early modern England or issues of popular political consciousness and behaviour more generally.

MICHAEL J. BRADDICK is professor of history at the University of Sheffield. PHIL WITHINGTON is professor of history at the University of Sheffield.

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael J. Braddick, J. C. Davis, Amanda Flather, Steve Hindle, Mark Knights, John Morrill, Alexandra Shepard, Paul Slack, Richard M. Smith, Clodagh Tait, Keith Thomas, Phil Withington, Andy Wood, Keith Wrightson.

David Hume's six-volume History of England: From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (1754-61) is probably his most important work as a constitutional historian and political theorist. Jia Wei's book shows that the History can be understood in two ways: firstly, as Hume's own narrative of England's state formation, and secondly, as his answer to the question of how eighteenth-century Britain could cope with the challenges of commercial revolution. It illuminates the relationship between Hume the political thinker, Hume the historian, and Hume the political economist and highlights the social, economic and institutional changes which he wove into an innovative theory of causation.
The first part of the book considers Hume's account of the fundamentalrationale of maritime trade and England's unique approach to liberty in the modern era. The second part looks at his views concerning the profound impact of maritime trade on English politics. From his perspective, the problem of how to cope with the challenges posed by the commercial revolution in eighteenth-century Britain was closely linked to the question of how transoceanic trade had fundamentally recast English politics from the sixteenth century onwards. This study shows how these two narratives were interwoven into Hume's History and will be of interest to scholars and studentsnot only of David Hume and political theory but of historiography, eighteenth-century British history and Enlightenment studies.

JIA WEI received her PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries more than 15,000 Londoners suffered sudden violent deaths. While this figure includes around 3,000 who were murdered or committed suicide, the vast majority of fatalities resulted from accidents. In the early modern period, accidental and 'disorderly' deaths - from drowning, falls, stabbing, shooting, fires, explosions, suffocation, animals and vehicles, among other causes - were a regular feature of urban life and left a significant mark in the archival records of the period.
This book provides the first substantive critical study of the early modern accident, revealing and chronicling the lives - and deaths - of hundreds of otherwise unknown Londoners. Drawing on the weekly London Bills of Mortality, parish burial registers, newspapers and other related documents, it examines accidents and other forms of violent death in the city with a view to understanding who among its residents encountered such events, how the bureaucracy recorded and elaborated their circumstances and why they did so, and what practical responses might follow. Through a systematic review of the character of accidents, medical and social interventions, and changing attitudes toward the regulation of hazards across the metropolis, it establishes the historical significance of the accident and shows how, as the eighteenth century progressed, providential explanations gave way to a more rational viewpoint that saw certain accident events as threats to be managed rather than misfortunes to be explained. Additionally, the book explores how knowledge of such incidents was transformed to become a recurring cultural trope in oral, textual and visual narratives of metropolitan life, thereby opening a window to the way in which sudden death and violent injury was understood by early modern mentalities.

CRAIG SPENCE is Senior Lecturer in History at Bishop Grosseteste University.