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"The first social and cultural history of vagrancy between 1650 and 1750, this book combines sources from across England and the Atlantic world to describe the shifting and desperate experiences of the very poorest and most marginalized of people in early modernity; the outcasts, the wandering destitute, the disabled veteran, the aged labourer, the solitary pregnant woman on the road and those referred to as vagabonds and beggars are all explored in this comprehensive account of the subject. Using a rich array of archival and literary sources, Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650-1750 offers a history not only of the experiences of vagrants themselves, but also of how the settled 'better sort' perceived vagrancy, how it was culturally represented in both popular and elite literature as a shadowy underworld of dissembling rogues, gypsies, and pedlars, and how these representations powerfully affected the lives of vagrants themselves. Hitchcock's is an important study for all scholars and students interested in the social and cultural history of early modern England."--

Abstract
This article examines the policy of penal transportation to the colonies which underpinned the first British Empire in the Atlantic. It argues that the transportation and indenture of the criminal poor came to be justified by empire's architects as a charitable reprieve from a life course of decaying indigence and idleness. "Charity" of this nature serviced the needs of the British imperial state and its elites, particularly the need for the malleable biopower of indentured labor, but also the demand for increasingly rigorous carceral control. Transportation also created a clear distinction between the poor so reprieved and those still deserving of traditional relief at home. The article names these justifying discourses of judicial punishment-as-charity as "welfare colonialism." We might view this regime as an early forerunner of the terrible paternalisms of "philanthrocapitalism," and its operation as fundamental to the first British "Empire of Charity."

Explores regional anxieties about the political, economic, and social costs of rapid economic development; focuses on perceived negative aspects of social change; based on interviews conducted with 100 leaders, specialists, and professionals in seven East Asian countries, 1996. Excerpted from the author's report "Factors affecting East Asian views of the United States: the search for common ground", Washington, DC, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Mar. 1997, indexed in PAIS International, 1997. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, China, South Korea, and Japan.

"The Routledge History of Poverty in Europe, c.1450-1800 is a pioneering exploration of both the lives of the very poorest during the early modern period, and of the vast edifices of compassion and coercion erected around them by individuals, institutions, and states. By exploring poverty and the poor across early modern Europe, this study is essential reading for students and researchers of early modern society, economic history, state formation and empire, cultural representation, and mobility."

AbstractThe discounted return associated with a finite state Markov chain X1, X2… is given by g(X1)+ αg(X2) + α2g(X3) + …, where g(x) represents the immediate return from state x. Knowing the transition matrix of the chain, it is desired to compute the expected discounted return (present worth) given the initial state. This type of problem arises in inventory theory, dynamic programming, and elsewhere.Usually the solution is approximated by solving the system of linear equations characterizing the expected return. These equations can be solved by a variety of well‐known methods. This paper describes yet another method, which is a slight modification of the classical iterative scheme. The method gives sequences of upper and lower bounds which converge mono‐tonely to the solution. Hence, the method is relatively free of error control problems.Computational experiments were conducted which suggest that for problems with a large number of states, the method is quite efficient. The amount of computation required to obtain the solution increases much slower with an increase in the number of states, N, than with the conventional methods. In fact, computational time is more nearly proportional to N2, than to N3.