Institutional Change and Property Rights before the Industrial Revolution: Wardship in Britain, 1485–1660...

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Sean Bottomley (Cardiff University)

Institutional Change and Property Rights before the Industrial Revolution

Name: Institutional Change and Property Rights before the Industrial Revolution
Price: 249.22 AUD
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ISBN: 9781009384353

Wardship in Britain, 1485–1660

Sean Bottomley (Cardiff University)

$311.95 $249.22

Hardback

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English

Cambridge University Press
06 November 2025

Economic history

Series: Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series

Secure property rights are widely considered to be an essential prerequisite for sustained economic development; in Britain it is debated whether they have been secure since the medieval period or only established in the mid-seventeenth century. Within this context, Sean Bottomley examines wardship - the Crown's prerogative right(s) to appropriate landed estates which had descended to a legal minor until they attained their majority, to take custody of the child and, where they were unmarried, to decide their marriage partner. Bottomley demonstrates that this constituted a significant yet grossly inefficient and corrupted source of crown revenue, one that inflicted tangible economic penalties. It was also indicative of the decaying capacity of the early Stuart state and Bottomley concludes that without the constitutional changes of the mid to late seventeenth-century, Britain would not have industrialised in the eighteenth-century.

By: Sean Bottomley (Cardiff University)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Weight: 554g
ISBN: 9781009384353
ISBN 10: 100938435X
Series: Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 06 November 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Sean Bottomley is an economic historian at Cardiff University. His first book, The British Patent System during the Industrial Revolution (2014), won both the Economic History Society's biennial First Monograph Prize and the Selden Society's David Yale Prize.

Reviews for Institutional Change and Property Rights before the Industrial Revolution: Wardship in Britain, 1485–1660

'An important new work which re-interprets opposition to the Court of Wards from an institutional economics point of view, arguing for the vital importance of its abolition in securing property rights against the crown.' Craig Muldrew, author of The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England