Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

3 results

  • 5 - Urban Markets

  • Edited by Catriona Macleod, University of Glasgow, Alexandra Shepard, University of Glasgow, Maria Ågren, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    The Whole Economy
    Published online:
    09 June 2023
    Print publication:
    15 June 2023, pp 136-163

  • Summary

    Much of the research that has been done in the last decades on women’s work and on the role of women in early modern economies deals with the urban context, but has all this production been able to rewrite the history of work in early modern European cities? The urban labour markets of early modern Europe combined two opposite and at the same time complementary features as they were regulated and structured by institutions. Yet they were also flexible and open, offering chances and opportunities to immigrant and non-qualified workers as well as the possibility of earning through activities at the limits of, or beyond, legality. The chapter addresses these observations and these questions first, by presenting the existing quantitative data on women’s work activities in different urban contexts and, secondly, by focusing on the problem of guilds and more generally on different aspects of work organization. The aim of the chapter is to present the state of the field but also to propose a vision of urban economies that integrates the gender dimension and maintains an approach that is as Europe-wide as possible.

  • (b) - Urban society

  • from 1 - Social change in the thirteenth century
  • David Abulafia, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    21 October 1999, pp 26-37

  • Summary

    The line between urban and rural society, the small town and the big village, is a fine one and traditionally depends on whether or not a majority of the population supported itself other than by fishing, farming or tending herds. The principal theme of thirteenth-century urban society is the challenge of population growth, perhaps the most decisive changes in urban society reflect what responses were made to the problems of growth. The concept of urban citizenship was as yet a hazy notion, but in places where the city was the state, being a citizen conferred advantages. The political and economic freedom was an ambiguous benefit to half of urban society: women. Urban society offered some single women new opportunities, either through religious experimentation or the burgeoning wage economy, to live in ways not completely shaped by men. Widows were in the best position to take advantage of all this, but poor women remained the most desperate members of urban society.

  • 1 - Mughal India

  • from XIV - Towns and Cities
  • Edited by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Irfan Habib
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 1982, pp 434-451

  • Summary

    The cities and towns of the Indian sub-continent served as the repositories of higher culture and learning, both as reservoirs in which were preserved the Sanskritic and Indo-Islamic 'Great Traditions' and as conduits through which those traditions could be transmitted to society as a whole. Considering the enormous diversity of urban economies and urban cultures spanning the sub-continent, it would be impossible to speak of a typical Indian city of the Mughal period. The relations between the urban population and the Mughal state were determined in large measure by the fact that the traditional Indo-Muslim city, like the traditional Islamic city in north Africa and the Middle East, lacked any kind of corporate or municipal institutions. The kōtwāl's authority was so extensive and touched so many aspects of urban life, the towns and cities of Mughal India must have been very strictly controlled on behalf of the central government.