A01=Ellen Paterson
Author_Ellen Paterson
Category=KCZ
Charters
Cloth
commerce
commissions
Corporations
Corporatism
early modern England
Elizabeth I
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eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
free trade
glass
Grocers' Company
incorporation
James I
leather
Leathersellers Company
liberties
livery companies
London
Merchant Adventurers
parliament
patents
petitioning
Politicisation
prerogative
public sphere
Staplers' Company
trade
wool
Product details
- ISBN 9781526189080
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 16 Sep 2025
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book offers the first in-depth analysis of anti-monopoly petitioning in late-Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Drawing on a range of manuscript petitions, it reveals the centrality of the issues of monopoly and corporatism for the politicisation of a range of subjects between 1590-1625. Both Elizabeth I and James I liberally granted monopolies and charters as a fiscal device. Petitioning emerged as the main way through which subjects protested these intrusions on their trades and livelihoods. Whilst this activity occurred throughout the realm, it was especially pronounced in the city of London. Members of London’s livery companies, bodies which held exclusive rights to trade, petitioned for and against monopolies and charters. Bloodsuckers of the Commonwealth offers a fresh perspective on political culture in this well-studied period by arguing that economic policies generated conflicts, contests, and participation in a nascent public sphere.
Ellen Paterson is CMRS Career Development Fellow in Early Modern History at Keble College, University of Oxford
