Mary Darly has been called the mother of British caricature, a pioneer who – with her husband Matthias – paved the way for the ‘golden age’ of satirical prints. This chapter reveals new details of her life and her twenty-four-year career gleaned largely from study of the Darly prints and newspaper advertisements. Mary saw the importance of prints in influencing political affairs: she produced satires before her marriage in 1759 as well as after her husband’s death in 1780, and she published some of the most virulent prints in the campaign against prime minister Lord Bute in 1762–1763. Appealing to the new fashion for images that exaggerated facial features, in 1762 she published the first how-to book in English, The Principles of Caricatura Drawing. The Darlys produced a wide range of prints but their greatest success came in the 1770s with a series of caricatures of well-known people described as ‘Macaronies’. Designs were provided by enthusiastic amateurs and people flocked to the Darly shop near Charing Cross for their annual exhibitions – the first commercial print shows in London.

The Magna Carta is probably the most famous British document, composed in Latin in 1215 to record the agreement between king John and his barons regarding the king’s responsibilities and the rights of the people. Here several clauses are excerpted from the 1225 version published under king Henry III, with references given to the clauses in the 1215 version. These clauses relate to women’s incomes, the right to basic maintenance, standardisation of weights and measures, the problems caused by obstructions in rivers, each person’s right to a swift and fair trial, and freedom of movement for foreign traders.

The section on town life and trade includes an early town charter for Newcastle, an item in a Patent roll recording payment made to a ‘tranter’ who travelled the country sourcing food for the king, rules for a craft Guild in the Records of Leicester, a Close roll in which the king sets the price of wine in London in 1315, and excerpts from the port records of imports and exports, with names of ships, the ship’s owner and the contents of the cargo.

This section provides examples for a number of different kinds of documents associated with the courts, with crime and punishment, namely Curia Regis Rolls (published for the early thirteenth century in a fascinating series of volumes), Ecclesiastical suit rolls, relating to questions of adultery and fornication, Gaol Delivery rolls recording the pleas of those who were then freed from prison, and the Assize of Bread, concerned with maintaining standards in the production of bread and ale.

This chapter focuses on the impact of trade on the functioning of the economy of favor. It argues that the growing importance of conspicuous consumption in New Spain and the introduction of new venal practices raised questions about the assessment process that, according to many, was the key to a just distributive process. In the context of these discussions surrounding such impact, transpacific trade was thematized as well. After discussing critical reflections about the ways in which consumption and trade affected ideas of worthiness, the chapter returns to Rodrigo de Vivero’s Abisos to analyze his critique of the growing influence of commerce on New Spanish society and distributive processes in the Spanish empire. Subsequently, it examines the efforts of Mexico City’s cabildo to fashion a particular image of a deserving community while negotiating with the Crown over financial contributions to the Armada de Barlovento. By juxtaposing Vivero’s reflections with those of Mexico City’s cabildo, the chapter seeks once more to exhibit how calls for isolationism or economic integration were each, in their discrete way, crucial to the distributive struggles within the viceroyalty.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

A polite social order emerged out of significant demographic, economic, and political changes in the early to mid-eighteenth century, and was established according to novel ideas about personal virtue, piety, and white masculinity. Members of an exclusive merchant elite embraced new models of personal deportment and constructed physical spaces, both public and domestic, in which to practice and display their gentility. Shared values, including an ethos of polite speech, united this elite and linked them with their English counterparts. Polite speech was explicated in conduct and courtesy books, in popular periodicals, in personal conversation with fellow gentlemen – and as distinct from vulgar speech, increasingly associated with particular types of people. Linguistic and social hierarchies proved to be mutually reinforcing, and, for the genteel, it was increasingly impolite (not ungodly or sinful) speech that posed the greater threat to good social order or “the peace.” That new social order would be enforced and enacted through law, the statutes, and procedures by which impolite speech was criminalized, prosecuted, and punished.

The Introduction summarizes the book's main research questions and arguments. It asks why forty-nine Muslim-majority countries have higher levels of violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, in comparison to world averages. It criticizes the explanations that point to Islam or Western colonialism as the root cause. Instead, it argues that the ulema–state alliance, which emerged in the eleventh century, has been the main reason for Muslims' enduring problems. The ulema–state alliance marginalized the intellectual and bourgeois classes. This alliance also eliminated a certain level of separation between religious and political authorities, as well as intellectual and economic dynamism, which existed in the Muslim world before the eleventh century.