African Developments in the Doldrums Book

A scholarly book but very approachable. His overview of the historiography of the period was very helpful, providing context for the ideas of RH Tawney, which with Christopher Hill underlay much of my A-Level history syllabus. I was very interested to see how attitudes to money, land, work and finance shifted in the 16C.

Quite a lot of the Scottish context was familiar from Tom Devine's The Scottish Clearances but it was good to have that reinforced. In England 70% of cultivable land had been enclosed by 1700, a process that had been pursued for at least 200 years. The medieval field strip system was distinctly inefficient.

The key message here is the 300 year shift from a predominantly rural, feudal society to one in which wage labour was much more usual and the middle classes represented almost a quarter of the population.