Book Reviews

Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy.
Phillipp Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200–1500.
Nicola Verdon, Rural Women Workers in 19th Century England: Gender, Work and Wages.
Jonathan R. Pincus and Jeffrey Winters (eds), Reinventing the World Bank.
Julie A. Charlip, Cultivating Coffee: The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880–1930.
Monica M. van Beusekom, Negotiating Development: African Farmers and Colonial Experts at the Office du Niger, 1920–1960.
Abdul Rahman Embong, State-led Modernization and the New Middle Class in Malaysia.
David M. Anderson, Eroding the Commons: The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya 1890s–1963.
Jan Breman and Gunawan Wiradi, Good Times and Bad Times in Rural Java: Case Study of Socio-Economic Dynamics in Two Villages Towards the End of the Twentieth Century.
Mario Rutten, Rural Capitalists in Asia: A Comparative Analysis on India, Indonesia and Malaysia.     

Urban population in late medieval England: the evidence of the lay subsidies

Was there a growth in the proportion of the population living in England's towns in the later middle ages? Uncertainty about national population trends and about the taxation multipliers needed to arrive at population totals has made it difficult to answer this question. A direct comparison of the proportion of taxpayers that was urban in 1377 and 1524 suggests that the urban share of population was static or may even have declined in this period. However, such decline provides no simple index of urban prosperity or decay: a decline in urbanization could be the product of rural buoyancy rather than of urban recession.