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Linda S. Clark is a distinguished scholar of fifteenth-century England, best known for her important contribution to the study of the late medieval English parliament. She has served as general editor of 'The Fifteenth Century' since 2003. This special volume in the series marks her four decades of work for the History of Parliament Trust. As is appropriate, its essays focus above all on Parliament and the personalities that served in its chambers, but they also illuminate a wider range of themes that have long concerned students of the later middle ages, including the lawlessness of the gentry and nobility, the acquisition and management of their estates, and their self-expression in pageantry and legend. Other social groups, ranging from the mercantile élite of the city of London and their Italian trading partners to England's common soldiers, also make an appearance. Several of the papers collected here have a geographical focus in London and East Anglia, but other regions are also represented. The collection thus pays tribute to the breadth of Dr Clark's contribution to the field, both in her own writing, and in her long-standing commitment to facilitate the publication of the original research of others. Contributors: A. J. Pollard, Simon Payling, Charles Moreton, Colin Richmond, J. L. Bolton, James Ross, Carole Rawcliffe, Elizabeth Danbury, Matthew Davies, Hannes Kleineke, David Grummitt, Caroline M. Barron

This chapter explores two cases of rice relief work (in 1907 and in 1919) conducted by the Cantonese mercantile elite, which they carried out with strong cooperation from their Hong Kong counterparts. It also examines what famine meant to the Cantonese public in a time of extreme rice shortage. The success of famine relief was secured by the professionalization and specialization of the rice business. The nexus of the Canton and Hong Kong rice trade could provide the most professionalized and specialized rice relief. The Canton Food Relief Association under Jian Zhaonan and Chen Lianbo is then described. The Association invited a few leading rice traders to participate and took their advice. Huang Xianzhi's precautious analysis and straightforward consultation with the Association greatly helped the rice relief efforts in 1919. Rice relief works needed as much special care of rice quality as normal market conditions did.

Throughout history the British Atlantic has often been depicted as a series of well-ordered colonial ports that functioned as nodes of Atlantic shipping, where orderliness reflected the effectiveness of the regulatory apparatus constructed to contain Atlantic commerce. Colonial ports were governable places where British vessels, and only British vessels, were to deliver English goods in exchange for colonial produce. Yet behind these sanitized depictions lay another story, one about the porousness of commercial regulation, the informality and persistent illegality of exchanges in the British Empire, and the endurance of a culture of cross-national cooperation in the Atlantic that had been forged in the first decades of European settlement and still resonated a century later.In Empire at the Periphery, Christian J. Koot examines the networks that connected British settlers in New York and the Caribbean and Dutch traders in the Netherlands and in the Dutch colonies in North America and the Caribbean, demonstrating that these interimperial relationships formed a core part of commercial activity in the early Atlantic World, operating alongside British trade. Koot provides unique consideration of how local circumstances shaped imperial development, reminding us that empires consisted not only of elites dictating imperial growth from world capitals, but also of ordinary settlers in far-flung colonial outposts, who often had more in common with--and a greater reliance on--people from foreign empires who shared their experiences of living at the edge of a fragile, transitional world.Part of the series Early American Places

This article argues that the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) was in essence a terror of state directed by mercantile economic and political elites (the comprador class) controlling the Lebanese state and society against the middle and poorer classes (the working class). The aim of this terror or organized violence was to subdue the subordinate classes, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s rebelled against the confessional system that operated for the benefit of the comprador class. The rebellion was expressed by members of the working-class joining cross-confessional nationalist and leftist parties. Hence, violence was aimed at reestablishing the confessional order as a means to restore a hegemonic system that served the interests of the comprador class at a time when this class was rehabilitating its economic role by resurrecting the financial system, which had received a severe blow in the late 1960s. It effected this rehabilitation through the Taif Agreement signed between Lebanese parliamentarians in 1989, under the auspices of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, to favor the new mercantile elite led by Rafiq Hariri.

La Storia antica del Messico de Francisco Javier Clavijero circuló en su edición italiana por las principales ciudades de América a finales del siglo xviii y principios del xix. A partir de su presencia en el Telégrafo Mercantil, Rural, Político, Económico e Historiográfico del Río de la Plata, se analizó su difusión y apropiación. A pesar de los inconvenientes que tuvo la obra de Clavijero para su edición al castellano, se publicó en Buenos Aires una traducción local. La obra fue leída como una reivindicación americana, en el marco del proyecto ilustrado de civilización de las costumbres que la élite criolla fomentó mediante la prensa.