This section of the database is dedicated to examining the production, provenance, and consumption of luxury items and goods across different strata of society. The data captures a wide array of luxury items such as precious metals, luxury fabrics, manufactured goods, spices, incense, and dyes, luxury drinks/alcohol, glass goods, fine ceramic wares, precious stones, statuary, and luxury food. These variables highlight the intersection of economy, culture, and social hierarchy.
Here you can search or browse our records of industrial workers and literary culture across Scotland and the North of England. We have entries for individuals, for literary works (many including transcriptions of poems, songs or prose extracts), and for associations that sponsored literary activities and were connected to industry.
This website offers double rekeyed and fully searchable text of a selection of serials collected by seventeenth-century bookseller George Thomason. As is well known, the Thomason collection of newsbooks is a very significant body of texts. Though many bibliophiles from the period amassed impressive personal collections of contemporary books and pamphlets, none did so with Thomason's assiduity, rigour and care. Thomason regarded serials as a key component of a rich archive of printed and manuscript materials; he acquired around 7,200 of them, approximately one third of his total book collection, and, in placing them cheek-by-jowl with very different kinds of text, privileging the date he received a work above the status of the author or genre of a text, problematized distinctions between cheap unbound pamphlets and the more stable and respectable bibliographic category of the book.
This project aims to survey the vast hidden archive of early Stuart England's manuscript pamphlets. In collaboration with the British Library, this project will construct a database of manuscript pamphlet texts, bibliographic information, and digital images. This will allow users to search transcriptions of the pamphlets; analyze the distribution of copies through time and space; and see how such materials were presented: large and small, elaborate and plain, professional and amateur. The project will conduct additional research in the private papers of Francis Russell, fourth earl of Bedford, who was a major political figure of the early Stuart era as well as a reader and collector of manuscript pamphlets.
This research project explores the insight that the period between the introduction of tobacco in the 1570s and the ‘Gin Craze’ of the early eighteenth century was a formative phase in the production, traffic, consumption, and representation of intoxicants. By intoxicants – a less ideologically loaded term than ‘drugs’, and a more historical descriptor for non-medicinal commodities – we mean substances understood at the time to be ‘poisoning, or envenoming’ and ‘tuddling or making drunk’, and which today are recognized as having an often detrimental impact on the body’s physiological and mental processes, especially if consumed to excess.” “The resulting research tool will be an interactive website, providing free access to the datasets generated by the project, and allowing the research team and a wider community of users to explore the relationships between the economic, social, political, material, and cultural realms of early modern intoxication. “These include people, places, objects (such as drinking vessels, printed images), organisations, language (context-specific terminology), and events (such as legislation or transactions). Each of these entities will have its own set of characteristics as well as relationships with one or more other entities. The resulting ‘ontology’ will enable the PI, Co-Is, and RAs to interrogate the entire range of data and visualise the results in ways which reveal trends and relationships that are not evident when consulting the documents individually. For example, changing volumes of tobacco or numbers of licence holders or uses of the word ‘drunkenness’ can be traced and contextualised diachronically whilst relationships between entities – for example tobacco, licences, and ‘drunkenness’ – are revealed synchronically.
“The Human Mobility Index (HMI)” that estimates the potential minimum travel time across the globe (measured in hours) accounting for human biological constraints, as well as geographical and technological factors that determined travel time before the widespread use of steam power. In particular, the HMI indices provide a distinct measure of human mobility potential in different eras:
Human Mobility Index (HMI): Mobility on land without seafaring technology. Shows mobility potential on land before the widespread use of steam power.
Human Mobility Index with Seafaring: HMI expanded to allow mobility on a select set of seas for which historical data was available. Shows potential mobility on land and seas before the introduction of ocean-faring ships.
Human Mobility Index with Ocean: HMI expanded to allow mobility on all seas based on CLIWOC (interpolated). Shows potential mobility on land and seas after the introduction of ocean-faring ships, but before the widespread use of steamships.
Based on these cost surfaces, researchers can find the minimum travel times between locations or construct more sophisticated statistics based on these. For example, Ashraf, Galor and Özak (2010) construct measures of pre-historic geographical isolation to study the effect of isolation on development. Similarly, Özak (2010), Depetris-Chauvin and Özak (2016, 2020) and Michalopoulus and Özak (2019) construct potential trade and information flow networks among countries, ethnic groups, cities, and artificial geographical units, to study the origins of the division of labor, and the effect of technological change on isolation and development. Likewise, Depetris-Chauvin and Özak (2019) use these measures to construct artificial states based on Voronoi partitions.
This strategy overcomes the potential mismeasurement of distances generated by using geodesic distances (Özak 2010), for a period when travel time was the most important determinant of transportation costs. Additionally, it removes the potential concern that travel time to the frontier reflects a country’s stage of development, mitigating further possible endogeneity concerns. The research validates these measures by (i) analyzing their association with actual historical travel time; (ii) examining their explanatory power for the location of historical trade routes in the Old World; and (iii) analyzing their association with genetic and cultural distances.
The Famine and Dearth database contains searchable transcriptions of over 700 multilingual primary sources relating to situations of famine and dearth in early modern India and Britain. The archive contains texts in ten different languages including Persian, Bengali and Hindi as well as English, and offers English translations for the majority of texts. These texts cover a wide range of genres, including chronicle histories, gazetteers, official correspondence, legislation, pamphlets, periodicals, plays, poetry, surveys, and fiction and non-fiction prose.
England’s Immigrants 1330-1550, a fully-searchable database containing over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation. The information within this database has been drawn from a variety of published and un-published records – taxation assessments, letters of denization and protection, and a variety of other licences and grants – and offers a valuable resource for anyone interested in the origins, destinations, occupations and identities of the people who chose to make England their home during this turbulent period.
The project website is a major output of the project. It is a MySQL database containing tables on venues, people, companies, films, newspaper and trade press articles. The venues and film locations (mainly for non-fiction Scottish films) are georeferenced. This is used to generate map markers to display on the public page, allowing users to click through from the map to otherinformation in the database. We have used the underlying data in other ways - classifying and comparing layers in response to specific research questions - so we intend to make the raw data available for other film historians. However the 'front end' of the web site will present a simpler interface for public access, with just venues and film locations.
Collection of historical records of violent incidents in the United States, spanning from 1782 to the present day. The dataset is categorized by date, incident type, subtypes, casualties, geographical location of the violence, documented fatalities, and the authoritative sources from which this data is derived. Additionally, each entry includes a detailed narrative describing the specific circumstances surrounding the violent incident.
