Metropolitan communities

Ward, Joseph P.

Many long-held assumptions of historians and literary critics are sharply challenged in this interpretation of the cultural consequences of social, economic, and political change in early modern London. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, greater London's population nearly quintupled, surpassing 500,000 before 1700, making it Europe's largest metropolis. Contemporaries often complained that the many problems accompanying this urban development were the result of immigrants flocking to the rapidly expanding suburbs around the City of London. Such complaints assumed that immigrants chose to live outside the City in order to avoid the economic oversight of its trade guilds. The author offers an alternative to this view of London's expansion. His argument begins with an analysis of sermons, tracts, and poems suggesting that some Londoners of the time considered the suburbs...

See on librarything