Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition Kevin Schürer
Introduction
1. English society before and after the coming of industry
2. A one-class society
3. The village community
4. Misbeliefs about our ancestors
5. Births, marriages and deaths
6. Did the peasants really starve?
7. Personal discipline and social survival
8. Social change and revolution in the traditional world
9. The pattern of authority and our political heritage
10. The politics of exclusion and the rule of an élite
11. After the transformation
12. Understanding ourselves in time
General Note
List of Authorities
Index
Biography
Peter Laslett (1915–2001) was a Life Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. A leading historian of his generation, he was one of the founders of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. A passionate advocate for using radio and television to help history reach a wider audience, he worked as a BBC radio producer and ran a series of programmes on Anglia Television, the 'Dawn University'. With the sociologist Michael Young he also helped establish the Open University in 1969.
"Peter Laslett’s greatest gift as his best-known book, The World We Have Lost, suggests, was more for evocation than analysis: to bring back to life, in all their confusion, ingenuity and suffering, the human beings who have long gone." - John Dunn, The Independent
"The outcome of years of research…transformed our knowledge of the English family…Laslett showed how life in pre-industrial society was no idyll." - The Telegraph
