Title: <i>Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England</i>. By Mark Hailwood
Abstract: culture was built on a foundation of social hierarchy, a firm rejection of equality among its participants.Instead, it was the merchant economy, with all of its faults, that "was fundamentally more capable of ushering in democracy . .." (312).If we want to move forward, then, the best hope lies not in romanticizing the world we have lost but in fully understanding the economic cultures of early modern Europe in all of their variability, complexity, and overlap.