Bøger af Richard Grassby

Cultural historians have made the study of material culture and consumption a subject in its own right and a necessary precondition of industrialization. The culture of the bourgeoisie has, however, engaged historians and ideologues for some two centuries without any consensus as to when the middle class emerged or how it should be defined. This last of three volumes on the English business community fills this vacuum by exploring empirically how far and when it adopted an alternative lifestyle. It demonstrates how business families spent their money and asks whether their life styles and the possessions that they chose to acquire, constituted a new culture with shared values. It assembles from artifacts as well as from documents and literary sources, a three-dimensional image of the physical and spatial environment in which merchants pursued their daily routines. It then reconstructs their thoughts and feelings to determine whether their world view changed and, if so, in which directions.

In this text, Richard Grassby investigates the origins and evolution of the idea of capitalism to illustrate for readers the true nature, merits and the future of capitalism.

Exploits the wealth of documentation available to establish how Sir Dudley North made a fortune in the Levant commodity trade and through usury. The book explores his character, beliefs and intentions, and the diverse technical and personal reasons for his success.

This uncompromisingly empirical study reconstructs the public and private lives of urban business families during the period of England's emergence as a world economic power. Using a broad cross-section of archival sources, it tests the orthodox view that the family as an institution was transformed by capitalism and individualism.

This comprehensive study describes the structure of business in a pre-industrial economy and examines the way in which social values, demographic factors, the family, state and religion distributed talent, trained and motivated businessmen and determined their life style.