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Robber Baron (feudalism)
A robber baron or robber knight () was an unscrupulous feudalism, feudal landowner who, protected by his fief's legal status, imposed high taxes and tolls out of keeping with the norm without authorization by some higher authority. Some resorted to actual banditry. The German term for robber barons, ''Raubritter'' (robber knights), was coined by Friedrich Bottschalk in 1810.Klaus Graf, "Feindbild und Vorbild: Bemerkungen zur stadtischen Wahrnehmung des Adels", ''ZGO'' 141 (1993), pp. 121–154, at 138 Some robber barons violated the custom under which tolls were collected on the Rhine either by charging higher tolls than the standard or by operating without authority from the Holy Roman Emperor altogether. During the period in the history of the Holy Roman Empire known as the Great Interregnum (1250–1273), the number of such tolling stations exploded in the absence of Imperial authority. Medieval robber barons most often imposed high or unauthorized tolls on rivers or roads pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
King Stephen Of England
Stephen (1092 or 1096 – 25 October 1154), often referred to as Stephen of Blois, was King of England from 22 December 1135 to his death in 1154. He was Count of Boulogne ''jure uxoris'' from 1125 until 1147 and Duke of Normandy from 1135 until 1144. His reign was marked by the Anarchy, a civil war with his cousin and rival, the Empress Matilda, whose son, Henry II, succeeded Stephen as the first of the Angevin kings of England. Stephen was born in the County of Blois in central France as the fourth son of Stephen-Henry, Count of Blois, and Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror. His father died as a crusader while Stephen was still young, and he was brought up by his mother. Placed into the court of his uncle Henry I of England, Stephen rose in prominence and was granted extensive lands. He married Matilda of Boulogne, inheriting additional estates in Kent and Boulogne that made the couple one of the wealthiest in England. Stephen narrowly escaped drowning with Henry I's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Medieval Society
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and transitioned into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, the collapse of centralised authority, invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in late antiquity, continued into the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came und ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Rent-seeking
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, heightened debt levels, risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline. Successful capture of regulatory agencies (if any) to gain a coercive monopoly can result in advantages for rent-seekers in a market while imposing disadvantages on their uncorrupt competitors. This is one of many possible forms of rent-seeking behavior. Theory The term "rent", in the narrow sense of land rent, was coined by the British 19th-century economist David Ricardo, but rent-seeking only became the subject of durable interest among economists an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Robber Baron (industrialist)
Robber baron is a term first applied by 19th century muckrakers and others as social criticism to certain wealthy, powerful, and unethical 19th-century American businessmen. The term appeared in that use as early as the August 1870 issue of ''The Atlantic Monthly'' magazine. By the late 19th century, the term was typically applied to businessmen who used exploitative practices to amass their wealth. Those practices included Exploitation of natural resources, unfettered consumption and destruction of natural resources, Crony capitalism, influencing high levels of government, wage slavery, Anti-competitive practices, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors, and to create Monopoly, monopolies and/or Trust (business), trusts that control Market (economics), the market. The term combines the sense of criminal ("robber") and illegitimate aristocracy (“baron”) in a republic.Worth Robert Miller, ''Populist cartoons: an illustrated history of the third-party movement in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
The Pillars Of The Earth
''The Pillars of the Earth'' is a historical novel by British author Ken Follett published in 1989 about the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, England. Set in the 12th century, the novel covers the time between the sinking of the '' White Ship'' and the murder of Thomas Becket, but focuses primarily on the Anarchy. The book traces the development of Gothic architecture out of the preceding Romanesque architecture, and the fortunes of the Kingsbridge priory and village against the backdrop of historical events of the time. Before this novel was published, Follett was known for writing in the thriller genre. ''The Pillars of the Earth'' became his best-selling work. It was made into an 8-part miniseries in 2010, and a video game in 2017. The book was listed at no. 33 on the BBC's Big Read, a 2003 survey with the goal of finding the "nation's best-loved book". The book was selected in the United States for Oprah's Book Club in 2007. It is the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Ken Follett
Kenneth Martin Follett (born 5 June 1949) is a Welsh author of thrillers and historical novels who has sold more than 198 million copies of his works. His books have been sold in over 80 countries. Follett's commercial breakthrough came with the spy thriller '' Eye of the Needle'' (1978). After writing more best-sellers in the genre in the 1980s, he branched into historical fiction with '' The Pillars of the Earth'' (1989), an epic set in medieval England which became his best-known work and the first published in the ''Kingsbridge'' series. He has continued to write in both genres, including the ''Century Trilogy''. Many of his books have achieved high ranking on bestseller lists, including the number-one position on the ''New York Times'' Best Seller list. Early life and education Follett was born on 5 June 1949 in Cardiff, Wales. He was the first child of Martin Follett, a tax inspector, and Lavinia (Veenie) Follett, who went on to have two more children, Hannah and J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Basic Books
Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1950 and located in New York City, now an imprint of Hachette Book Group. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, science, politics, sociology, current affairs, and history. History Basic Books originated as a small Greenwich Village-based book club marketed to psychoanalysts. Arthur Rosenthal took over the book club in 1950, and under his ownership it soon began producing original books, mostly in the behavioral sciences. Early successes included Ernest Jones's ''The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud'', as well as works by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. Irving Kristol joined Basic Books in 1960, and helped Basic to expand into the social sciences. Harper & Row purchased the company in 1969. In 1997, HarperCollins announced that it would merge Basic Books into its trade publishing program, effectively closing the imprint and ending its publishing of serious academic books. That sam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Tragedy Of The Anticommons
The tragedy of the anticommons is a type of coordination breakdown, in which a commons does not emerge, even when general access to resources or infrastructure would be a social good. It is a mirror-image of the older concept of tragedy of the commons, in which numerous rights holders' combined use exceeds the capacity of a resource and depletes or destroys it. The "tragedy of the anticommons" covers a range of coordination failures, including patent thickets and submarine patents. Overcoming these breakdowns can be difficult, but there are assorted means, including eminent domain, laches, patent pools, or other licensing organizations. The two 'tragedies' may be compared as follows: * The 'tragedy of the commons' occurs when a resource has many users, none of whom own it, and thus none of whom have the ability to exclude others from using it, leading to the over-utilization of that resource. * The 'tragedy of the anticommons' occurs when a resource has many owners, all of whom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Michael Heller (law Professor)
Michael A. Heller is a professor of real estate law at Columbia Law School, specializing in property law. In 1998, while a professor at the University of Michigan Law School he published an article in the ''Harvard Law Review'' article, "The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets." The idea he introduced in that article, the ''"tragedy of the anticommons"'' (a term that he coined), sparked a debate among intellectual property theorists that continues to this day. Heller graduated from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, Harvard College, and Stanford Law School. During law school, he worked as a summer associate at the Washington, DC, law firm of Arnold & Porter LLP. Heller taught at the University of Michigan Law School from 1994 to 2002, and joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 2002. Heller’s scholarship has focused on private property laws and international property dilemmas. He published two articles on these topics in 2001: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Peterborough Chronicle
The ''Peterborough Chronicle'' (also called the Laud manuscript and the E manuscript) is a version of the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicles'' originally maintained by the monks of Peterborough Abbey, now in Cambridgeshire. It contains unique information about the history of England and of the English language after the Norman Conquest; according to philologist J. A. W. Bennett, it is the only prose history in English between the Conquest and the later 14th century. The ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicles'' were composed and maintained between the various monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England and were an attempt to record the history of Britain throughout the years AD. Typically the chronicles began with the birth of Christ, went through Biblical and Roman history, then continued to the present. Every major religious house in England kept its own, individual chronicle, and the chronicles were not compared with each other or in any way kept uniform. For example, in the opening paragraph of this chr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
The Anarchy
The Anarchy was a civil war in England and Duchy of Normandy, Normandy between 1138 and 1153, which resulted in a widespread breakdown in law and order. The conflict was a war of succession precipitated by the accidental death of William Adelin (the only legitimate son of Henry I of England, Henry I), who drowned in the White Ship disaster, ''White Ship'' disaster of 1120. Henry sought to be succeeded by his daughter, known as Empress Matilda, but was only partially successful in convincing the nobility to support her. On Henry's death in 1135, his nephew Stephen of Blois seized the throne with the help of Stephen's brother Henry of Blois, who was the bishop of Winchester. He was crowned as Stephen, King of England, King Stephen, and his early reign saw fierce fighting with disloyal English barons, rebellious Welsh leaders, and Scottish invaders. Following a major rebellion in the southwest of England, Matilda invaded in 1139 with the help of her half-brother Robert, 1st Earl o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
