List of illustrations
Abbreviations and Conventions
1: Introduction: Varieties of Improvement
2: The Discovery of England
3: Elizabethan Foundations 1570-1640
4: Revolutions 1640-1670
5: Wealth and Happiness 1670-1690
6: Challenges to Affluence 1690-1730
7: England's Improvement
8: Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Paul Slack is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern Social History at
Oxford University. He is the author of The Impact of Plague in
Tudor and Stuart England (1990), From Reformation to Improvement:
Public welfare in early modern England (1999) and books on urban
history and poverty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He
has been editor of the journal Past and Present, is a Fellow of the
British Academy, and was Principal of Linacre
College, Oxford, until 2010.
The Invention of Improvement combines sophisticated synthesis of
recent scholarship with extensive research on the printed
literature of the period. It deftly weaves together macro-analysis
of England's changing fortunes with illuminating vignettes of the
activities of particular visionaries and the texts that enshrined
their ambitions.
*Alexandra Walsham, The Times Literary Supplement*
This is a mature work of scholarship which describes and analyses
the development of economic theory in the early modern period and
its impact on economic and social policy in the time of Pepys.
Thought provoking and readable, it raises fundamental issues of
economic policy which are still relevant today.
*Julian Amey, chair of the 2015 judging panel for the Samuel Pepys
Award*
The historical sweep of this book is in fact vast, from the
Reformation of the Sixteenth Century through to the Enlightenment
of the 1700s and beyond. Its subject encompasses the entire
socio-economic development of that period. It is therefore a
challenging book but also a very rewarding one.
*Sue Nicholson, Pepys Diary*
This book extends the chronological breadth and analytical depth of
this research agenda and employs a novel analytical framework for
interpreting it: the culture of improvement.
*S. J. Thompson, Continuity and Change*
Its conceptualization and massively detailed content deserve the
highest praise ... Slack's magnum opus crowns a career in the field
of early modern economic history of quite exceptional
achievement.
*Anthony Fletcher, History*
this book offers the most detailed examination to date of the
development of this concept in English print culture from c.1570 to
c.1730 ... Slack's argument is informed by years of painstaking
research and extraordinarily wide reading.
*Brodie Waddell, English Historical Review*
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