Bloodsuckers of the Commonwealth: Monopolies, petitioning, and the public sphere in early modern England

This book offers the first in-depth analysis of anti-monopoly petitioning in late-Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Drawing on a range of manuscript petitions, it reveals the centrality of the issues of monopoly and corporatism for the politicisation of a range of subjects between 1590-1625. Both Elizabeth I and James I liberally granted monopolies and charters as a fiscal device. Petitioning emerged as the main way through which subjects protested these intrusions on their trades and livel...