Imagining the City: Crime and Commerce in Early Modern London

3 units

The astonishing demographic and economic growth of early modern London, and the rapid increase in spatial and social mobility that accompanied this growth seemed to harbinger, in the eyes of many contemporaries, a society in crisis and perhaps on the brink of collapse. As increasing numbers of vagrants or masterless men flocked to the metropolis and a growing number of people - apprentices, domestic labor, street vendors etc - lived on the fringes of legitimacy and at risk of lapsing into vagrancy, policing early modern London provided unique challenges for authorities. At the same time, the very notion of the social - a shared space of kinship and community could often seem to be under threat as an emerging market and a burgeoning commodity culture reshaped the traditional underpinnings of social and economic transactions. Yet, late Tudor and early Stuart London remained by far England's most prosperous metropolis, its primary market, home to a burgeoning print culture and nourishing theater and emerged, eventually, as the epicenter of a global economy. This course will consider the topographic, social and institutional configuration of early modern London and the ways in which these were reimagined and negotiated in the literature of the period. Drawing on the drama of the period and a wide array of pamphlet literature, we will discuss how civic institutions handled the growing influx of the poor and adapted to the increasing power of an emerging bourgeoisie who asserted themselves in unprecedented ways. In addition we will consider secondary sources ranging from maps, theories of urban space and social and economic historiography as well as digital archives and computational techniques that allow us to scale up our thinking about early modern London to a vast corpus of texts and documents.