Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland

Addressing the dynamics of power in early modern societies, this book challenges the existing tendency to see past societies in terms of binary oppositions--such as male/female, rich/poor, rulers/ruled. Drawing on recent social theory, the essays offer a series of micro-sociologies of power in early modern society, ranging from the politics of age, gender and class to the politics of state-building in the post-Reformation confessional state. Its findings also have relevance for thinking about inequality in present-day societies.

Michael J. Braddick (b.1962) has taught at the University of Sheffield since 1990, having held previous positions at the University of Alabama and Birmingham-Southern College, Alabama. His major study State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (2000) was published by Cambridge University Press.

John Walter is Professor of History at the University of Essex. His book Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (1999) was published by Cambridge University Press and won the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize. Previously Professor Walter was editor of Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (also Cambridge University Press, 1989, paperback 1991).