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Joanna Innes , Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Oxford University Press, 2009; xviii+364 pp; 978-0-19-820152-6.

In the mid 1970s and 1980s Joanna Innes - along with several others, including Paul Langford, John Brewer and John Styles - pioneered something of a new approach to the intersection of popular and high politics in eighteenth-century England. This tendency distinguished itself from an older brand of 'aristocratic' political history (Lewis Namier and his followers and critics, as well as the still older conceptions of history they replaced) by its interest in the political preoccupations and influence of more ordinary or least more 'middling' people: low-level bureaucrats, parish officials, debtors, prison staff, petty bourgeois urban rioters, and the like. At the same time, whatever their personal political sympathies, Innes and the others were not especially drawn to working-class history, were uninterested in uncovering the pre-history of modern class (or other) conflict and tended to eschew debates about the merits of Marxist (or most other) analytic categories. This set them apart, it bears pointing out, from the governing aims of the founders of the History Workshop Journal (1976-) which included both the pursuit of 'history from below' and (quite soon after the journal's founding) an explicit commitment to feminism and women's studies.1

What Innes and her colleagues were primarily interested in were the archives. And they became famous for their willingness to take on voluminous, unindexed or minimally indexed bodies of legal and administrative archives, as well as for their efforts to read these records as far as possible on their own terms. They were not alone in their devotion to the records, as can be seen in the work of John Beattie, Amy Erickson, Laura Gowing, Tim Hitchcock, Julian Hoppit, Henry Horwitz, Norma Landau, Craig Muldrew, Nicholas Rogers, Robert Shoemaker, and others. As a result of these people's work, King's Bench records, customs returns, admiralty sources, Chancery and Exchequer records, poor-law (and especially workhouse) records, assize and other criminal-court records, have all become a standard part of the arsenal of social and political history. Of course not all the purveyors of this 'deep archival' approach have eschewed contemporary political categories and concerns: 'history from [End Page 297] below' has helped animate such projects as the Old Bailey online, and the best work on women in the law courts is certainly not reluctant to acknowledge its relationship to political concerns. But (for better or worse) the subset of scholars with which Innes primarily aligned herself tended to identify high standards in archival research with a reluctance to be drawn into ideological debate. And of no one has this been more true than Innes herself.

Innes has focused especially on the history of crime, law enforcement, moral reform and prisons, and several of her essays on these topics (including her well-known essay on the King's Bench prison, reprinted in this volume) have become classics. She has also been active in other realms. She wrote a characteristically temperate review essay in Past & Present on Jonathan Clark's 1985 English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime, which is arguably the best contribution to the controversy sparked by the book. She has also co-edited two substantial collections of essays, and co-wrote the introduction to an important and innovatively organized parliamentary reference book edited by Julian Hoppit, Failed Legislation, 1660-1800 (1997). She was a co-editor of the journal Past & Present between 1990 and 2000, in a period when it significantly increased its coverage of India and the Middle East, as well as of gender and women's history.

Inferior Politics is, however, the first volume to appear under Innes's name that is devoted entirely to her own scholarship. The collection reproduces five of her previously published essays along with two lengthy new pieces, and an introduction that lays out the rationale for the volume while at the same time placing it within the historiography of eighteenth-century British governance. To quote the introduction: 'The central question that [these essays] address is...

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