The Cambridge Urban History Of Britain

Surveys the history of British towns from their post-Roman origins down to the sixteenth century.

The process of urbanisation and suburbanisation in Britain from the Victorian period to the twentieth century.

The first volume of The Cambridge Urban History surveys the history of British towns from their post-Roman origins in the seventh century down to the sixteenth century. It provides the first detailed overview of the course of medieval urban development, and draws on archaeological and architectural as well as historical sources. The volume combines thematic analysis with regional and national surveys, with full coverage of developments in England, Scotland and Wales, and the whole represents a major step forward in the understanding of the medieval British town.

The second volume of The Cambridge Urban History is the first comprehensive study of British towns and cities in the early modern period, and examines when, why, and how Britain became the first modern urban nation. The contributors offer a detailed analysis of the evolution of national and regional urban networks, and assess the growth of all the main types of towns. They discuss problems of urban mortality and migration, social organization, industrial growth and the service sector, civic governance, and the rise of religious and cultural pluralism.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the growth of interest in the urban past was one of the most prominent developments in historical studies in the United Kingdom. In part, this was due to the work of the late H. J. Dyos. This book brings together some of Dyos's most important and influential essays, written over nearly thirty years.

A new edition of the leading textbook on the economic history of Britain, Volume 2 re-examines Britain's economic growth and decline during the twentieth century.

Whilst in certain quarters it may be fashionable to suppose that there is no such thing as society historians, they have had no difficulty in finding their subject. The difficulty, rather, is that an outpouring of research and writing is hard for anyone but the specialist to keep up with the literature or grasp the overall picture. In these three volumes, as is the tradition in Cambridge Histories, a team of specialists has assembled the jigsaw of topical monographic research and presented an interpretation of the development of modern British society since 1750, from three perspectives: those of regional communities, the working and living environment, and social institutions. Each volume is self-contained, and each contribution, thematically defined, contains its own chronology of the period under review. Taken as a whole they offer an authoritative and comprehensive view of the manner and method of the shaping of society in the two centuries of unprecedented demographic and economic change.