Alan Macfarlane

The origins of English individualism : the family, property, and social transition

The Origins of English Individualism is about the nature of English society during the five centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and the crucial differences between England and other European nations. Drawing upon detailed studies of English parishes and a growing number of other intensive local studies, as well as diaries, legal treatises and contemporary foreign sources, the author examines the framework of change in England. He suggests that there has been a basic misinterpretation of English history and that this has considerable implications both for our understanding of modern British and American society, and for current theories concerning the preconditions of industrialization.

Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England : a regional and comparative study

This is a classic regional and comparative study of early modern witchcraft. The history of witchcraft continues to attract attention with its emotive and contentious debates. The methodology and conclusions of this book have impacted not only on witchcraft studies but the entire approach to social and cultural history with its quantitative and anthropological approach. The book provides an important case study on Essex as well as drawing comparisons with other regions of early modern England. The second edition of this classic work adds a new historiographical introduction, placing the book in context today.

Reconstructing historical communities

1. General approaches to the analysis of communities 2. The nature of the data 3. Manual analysis of the data 4. The quality of the data 5. Some uses for the data 6. Virtues and defects of the records and the method.

The family life of Ralph Josselin, a seventeenth-century clergyman : an essay in historical anthropology

Ralph Josselin, vicar of Earls Colne in Essex from 1641 to his death in 1683, kept for almost forty years a remarkably detailed account of his life-his mental and emotional world as well as his activities. Few diaries from this period afford such a rounded picture of a family from so many aspects. Alan Macfarlane, a historian and lecturer in social anthropology at Cambridge University, explores through the diary Josselins life as a farmer, businessman, Puritan clergyman, neighbor, husband, and father, providing a unique view of seventeenth-century life from the inside.

The Making of the Modern World

We can now return to some of the more general issues raised by this study of two theories concerning the making of the modern world. These are general reflections, stimulated by the thoughts of Maitland and Fukuzawa, but also drawing on other work I have undertaken over the last ten years. In particular, the chapter also draws on ideas generated by the two other books which I have written exploring these broad themes of the origins and nature of the modern world.1

The Riddle of the Modern World

In these famous lines written in 1732 Alexander Pope attempted to summarize the quintessential nature of human beings and their predicament. Pope did not know that the sense of contradiction which he felt was particularly intense in that very era because he was living on one of the great fault-lines of history. Mankind was just starting to witness spectacular changes which would alter all the parameters of human life, first in England, and later for all humans and all other species on this planet.

‘Japan’ in an English Mirror

‘The rise of Japan is surely one of the great epics of modern world history’. Yet it is not easy to obtain an overview of the development of Japanese civilization. Since the 1960s there has been an explosion of research which has overturned many of the older orthodoxies. The Cambridge History of Japan provides us with an unique chance to take stock. Here I will consider the four volumes covering the period from the twelfth to the later twentieth century.

David Hume and the political economy of agrarian civilization

Abstract Montesquieu and Adam Smith undertook deep analyses of the structural laws of agrarian civilizations and described the traps and tendencies which would prevent any final escape from constant toil and inequality. David Humes work in certain of his ‘Essays’ complements their work. He shows the social, political, religious and economic conditions which had made England the most free and wealthy nation in the world by his time. Simultaneously he shows the strong forces which would ultimately lead to stasis even in the English case.

The Principles Used in Selecting, Editing and Transferring Materials for an Archival Videodisc.

Abstract The article explains the methods used in selecting and transferring materials for the Cambridge Experimental Videodisc Project on the Nagas of Assam. The selection and editing of black and white photographs, moving film, photographs of objects, paintings, maps and sound, is described. The ways in which the selected materials were transferred to Edit Master videotape are explained. This should be of value to others who are engaged in (or contemplating) making archival videodiscs for use in teaching, research or public displays.

Power and Property

The crucial period for the Enlightenment theories concerning the divergence of England from much of continental Europe was between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. This is the classic period when European feudalism gradually turned into something else. Thus if we are to understand Maitland’s solution to the question of how modern English society emerged, we have to follow him into a fairly technical discussion of the nature and peculiarity of English feudalism and how it differed from that of its continental neighbours. Although this is complex, it is at the heart of his analysis. He shows the peculiar nature of the arrangement which emerged on this island, both centralized and decentralized, and he explains how this happened. By taking part of the feudal tie to its logical extreme, England benefited from great cohesion; by devolving power to the locality the country enjoyed flexibility and a certain amount of proto-democracy. Thus Maitland explains in detail what Tocqueville, Maine and others had only guessed and sketched out.