Social History

This volume examines the diaries of Richard Blechynden, a surveyor, architect, and builder in Calcutta. Sifting through anecdotes, extracts, and stories from over eighty volumes of diaries and papers, this book and its companion give a unique perspective into colonial households, daily life, corruption in law and private conduct, and emerging norms of identity. It explores the British impact on Indians and the Indian experience of the British, and shows detailed portraits of the servants and the children in Blechynden's household. The book also examines employer–employee relations between the colonials and the Indians, as well as the gross imperfections of petty systems of administration and justice. Finally, it reveals the status of the diarist's illegitimate children, including mixed-race children, their culture, their employment, and marriages, and his attempts to make them English.

This volume examines the diaries of Richard Blechynden, a surveyor, architect, and builder in Calcutta. Sifting through anecdotes, extracts, and stories from over eighty volumes of diaries and papers, this book and its companion give a unique perspective into colonial households, daily life, corruption in law and private conduct, and emerging norms of identity. Through Blechynden’s diaries, this book reveals the politics of power within households and the position of women, especially Blechynden’s concubines or bibis. This study on class, culture, gender, and race in colonial Calcutta explores the tensions and assimilations arising out of cross-cultural contact between the sexual and social mores of the English and the Indians. Demarcating the concepts of domestic, public, and private spaces, it allows us to eavesdrop on the lives of ordinary people, both European and Indian, richly detailing their day-to-day exchanges, their hopes, and their fears.

Timekeeping is an essential activity in the modern world, and we take it for granted that our lives are shaped by the hours of the day. This book is a study of the practice of timekeeping in England and Wales between 1300 and 1800 and how it was brought about by centuries of technical innovation and circulation of ideas about time. The authors illustrate how a particular kind of common sense about time came into being, and how it developed during this period. The study cites famous figures like John Harrison, who solved the problem of longitude, and less familiar characters like sailors, gamblers, and burglars. Overturning many common perceptions of the past — for example, that clock time and the industrial revolution were intimately related — this historical study is interested in how ‘telling the time’ has come to dominate our way of life.

Penetrating behind the seal of medieval confession is among the most formidable historiographical challenges. One route is through confessors’ manuals. This is a full-scale scholarly study of a fourteenth-century confessor’s English example. It contributes to the European-wide research on pre-Reformation confessional practice and clerical training. On another level, the Memoriale Presbiterorum’s peculiarly intense concern with social morality affords pungent commentary on contemporary English society. The author analyses a remarkable treatise both as a vehicle of social doctrine and as a mirror of the milieu to which it is directed. While presenting it against its general intellectual background, continental and English, he also argues for its setting within a vigorous and largely neglected episcopal regime, that of Bishop Grandisson of Exeter.

This study looks at rituals of sociability in new ways. Based upon thousands of personal letters, it reconstructs the changing country and London worlds of an English gentry family, and reveals intimate details about the social and cultural life of the period. Challenging current influential views, the book observes strong connections, instead of deep divisions, between country and city, land and trade, sociability and power. Its very different view undermines established stereotypes of omnipotent male patriarchs, powerless wives and kin, autonomous elder sons, and dependent younger brothers. Gifts of venison and visits in a coach reveal unexpected findings about the subtle power of women over the social code, the importance of younger sons, and the overwhelming impact of London. Combining storytelling and historical analysis, the book recreates everyday lives in a period of overseas expansion, financial revolution, and political turmoil.

This history goes beyond the great names and moments to explain how British sport has changed since 1800, and what it has meant to ordinary people. It shows how the way we play reflects not just our lives as citizens of a predominantly urban and industrial world, but what is especially distinctive about British sport. Innovators in abandoning traditional, often brutal sports, and in establishing a code of ‘fair play’, the British were also pioneers in popular sports and in the promotion of organized spectator events. Modern media coverage of sport, gambling, violence, and attitudes towards it; nationalism; and the role of sport in sustaining male identity are also explored, and the book is rich in anecdotes, which it combines with a serious historical understanding of the subject at hand.