Economic History

Michael Langley writes how, as early as 1620, an English traveller wrote an enthusiastic report on the wealth of the Gambia and its commercial possibilities.

George Woodcock describes how Malacca was once a city so rich that “its merchants valued garlic more highly than gold,” and how it has slowly dwindled in wealth and importance since the middle of the seventeenth century.

Although Pepys often refers in his Diary to Thomas Hill, he remains a somewhat shadowy figure. It is now possible to reconstruct his portrait. Hill emerges as a man after the diarist’s own heart—learned, inquisitive, sociable, garrulous. D. Pepys Whiteley recalls their friendship, which had begun in 1664 and continued until the merchant left England for Portugal.

J.L. Kirby describes how, early in the fifteenth century, King Henry IV of England ordered three trusted servants to conduct delicate negotiations with the rich cities of the Hanseatic League, whence England imported such precious commodities as dried fish, furs, tar and timber.

An accomplished Latin poet, no less distinguished in “council and prudent matters of state,” an expert cartographer and an enterprising ship-builder, William Petty was a many-sided man, typical of the scientific spirit of the later seventeenth century. By K. Theodore Hoppen.

Maurice Ashley describes how, divided by a vast gulf from the prospering gentry, seventeenth-century cottagers and labourers lived a poor and harsh life. After 1660, their standard of welfare seems to have declined.

‘Whoever is Lord in Malacca, has his hand on the throat of Venice’, wrote a European traveller during the period of the city's greatest glory. G.P. Dartford brings us back to a time when Malacca dominated the trade routes of the East.

Much of the history of any English district is recorded in its farmhouses. This, writes W.G. Hoskins, is particularly true of Devon; where, at some places, “farming has been carried out without a break since Romano-British times,” and possibly from the prehistoric period.

From the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, writes Penry Williams, State Lotteries were a regular feature of English government finance first introduced by Queen Elizabeth I.

The myth of the “Dark Continent” has recently been exploded by archaeologists. A rich indigenous culture was established long before the coming of the white man. The memorials that it left behind are here described and appraised by Robert A. Kennedy.