Suchergebnisse

"This is the first book to survey the experience of servants in rural Europe from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Live-in servants were a distinctive element of early modern society. They were typically young adults aged between 16 and 24 who lived and worked in other people's households before marriage. Servants tended to be employed for long periods, several months to years at a time, and were paid with food and lodging as well as cash wages. Both women and men worked as servants in large numbers. Unlike domestic servants in towns and wealthy households, rural servants typically worked on farms and were an important element of the agricultural workforce. Historians have viewed service as a distinct life-cycle stage between childhood and marriage. It brought both freedom and servility for young people. It allowed them to leave home and earn a living before marriage, whilst learning a range of agricultural and craft skills which reduced their dependence on their parents and increased their choice in marriage partners. Still, servants had limited rights: they were under the authority of their employer, with a similar legal status to children. In many countries the employment of servants was tightly controlled by law. Servants could demand their wages, and leave when the contract ended, but had to work long hours and had little say in their work tasks during employment. While some servants effectively became family members, trusted and cared for, others were abused physically and sexually by their employers."--Back cover

This 1999 book provides a concise introduction to the economic history of one of the major world powers. China is probably the only major economy for which it is still not certain whether modern economic growth at the aggregate level had taken hold by the middle of the twentieth century. This introductory analysis of the process of economic change in China from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth looks at the nature of the traditional economy, covers the pressure it came under from both internal and external sources during the nineteenth century and assesses the evolution of modern features in the twentieth. With maps, tables and bibliography to guide the student, this concise study will provide an invaluable introduction to crucial aspects of Chinese history

Since the 1870s the British economy has steadily declined from its position as the 'workshop of the world' to that of a low-ranking European power. Michael Sanderson examines the question of how far defects in education and training have contributed to this economic decline. By looking at issues such as literacy, the quality of scientific and technical training, the supposed anti-industrial bias of public schools and the older universities, the neglect of vocational and technical training and the neglect of the non-academic teenager, Michael Sanderson demonstrates that education was far from the sole cause of economic decline, but that its deficiencies have certainly played a part. This book offers an accessible and concise analysis of a topic of current importance, interest and debate and will be of interest to students and teachers of the history of education and its impact on British economic development in the twentieth century

This book is intended to be a guide to the burgeoning literature on the history of childhood. Harry Hendrick reviews the most important debates and the main findings of a number of historians on a range of topics including the changing social constructions of childhood, child-parent relations, social policy, schooling, leisure and the thesis that modern childhood is 'disappearing'. The intention of this concise study is to provide readers with a reliable account of the evolution of some of the most important developments in adult-child relations during the last one hundred years. The author draws his material not only from historians but also from sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and children's rights activists. Thus he successfully shows how much of our 'modern' understanding of childhood and of children results from both an historical and a social scientific understanding