Inferior Politics

Joanna Innes was born in London in 1954 and educated in England and the United States. She studied history at Cambridge, and has been a fellow and tutor at Somerville College Oxford since 1982. She was for ten years, 1990-2000, co-editor of the journal Past and Present. She has contributed to the revitalisation of eighteenth-century British history, now widely recognised as a lively and innovative field of study. She is now pursuing her interests in the development of British social policy into the early nineteenth century.

• Introduction ; STRUCTURES ; Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century English Social Policy ; The Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal State: State and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain ; The Local Acts of a National Parliament: Parliament's Role in Sanctioning Local Action in Eighteenth-Century Britain ; EMPIRICAL ENQUIRY ; Power and Happiness: Empirical Social Enquiry from Political Arithmetic to Moral Statistics ; CASE STUDIES ; Politics and Morals: the Reformation of Manners Movement in Later Eighteenth-Century England ; The King's Bench Prison in the Later Eighteenth Century: Law, Authority and Order in a London Debtors' Prison ; The Protestant Carpenter: William Payne of Bell Yard (c. 1718-1782). The Life and Times of a London Informing Constable

Innes has a great deal to say about the structure of British politics in the eighteenth century, some of it very revisionist, and she retains - rightly in my view - a reputation as one of the most judicious interpreters in the field.