This volume illustrates how broad-ranging this research tradition has become in the last thirtyyears, extending well beyond the study of commercialization and the reorganization of fertile land, to encompass histories of identity, landscape, popular experience, and state capacity. Despite this breadth of ambition, the volume retains and sustains a coherent, though varied, account of a set of communities that underwent significant changes from the late medieval period onward, but for which the rate and scale of transformation accelerated after 1750.