Earle, Peter 1937–

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Earle, Peter 1937–

PERSONAL:

Born 1937.

ADDRESSES:

Home— London, England. Office— Senate House, University of London, Malet St., London WC1E 7HU, England.

CAREER:

Writer, historian. University of London, emeritus reader in economic history.

WRITINGS:

Corsairs of Malta and Barbary, Sidgwick & Jackson (London, England), 1970.

The Life and Times of Henry V, introduction by Antonia Fraser, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1972.

The Life and Times of James II, introduction by Antonia Fraser, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1972.

Robert E. Lee, introduction by Lord Chalfont, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1973, Saturday Review Press (New York, NY), 1974.

(Editor)Essays in European Economic History, 1500-1800, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1974.

The World of Defoe, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1976, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1977.

Monmouth's Rebels: The Road to Sedgemoor, 1685, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1977, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1978.

The Treasure of the Concepcion, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1980.

The Last Fight of the Revenge, Collins & Brown (London, England), 1982.

The Sack of Panama: Sir Henry Morgan's Adventures on the Spanish Main, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1982, published as The Sack of Panama: Captain Morgan and the Battle for the Caribbean, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2007.

The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660-1730, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1989.

A City Full of People: Men and Women of London, 1650-1750, Methuen (London, England), 1994.

Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650-1775, Methuen (London, England), 1998.

The Middle Ages, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2000.

The Pirate Wars, Methuen (London, England), 2003, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

British historian Peter Earle has written a number of engaging volumes on aspects of English history from the growth of towns and the middle class, to the world of sailing and piracy. In his The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660-1730, he takes a generational look at the building of the English bourgeoisie, beginning with an earlier date for that process than most historians. Earle provides, according to English Historical Review contributor D.W. Jones, "a most evocative study of London's economic and social life over these years." Earle employs sources including the records of almost four hundred estates from the seventy years included in his study, as well as material from the early English novelist Daniel Defoe. "The picture that emerges is satisfyingly complete," noted Jones. Earle manages to paint a picture of London at the time in which men of the rising middle classes earned their livings in such disparate trades as manufacturing, doctoring, and even undertaking. He also looks at the role of women in business and further examines the social life of the time by showing the various sorts of lives such incomes supported. Jones concluded, "This work will surely be saluted for having so evocatively brought back to teeming life the London of Daniel Defoe." C. John Sommerville, writing in the Business History Review, observed that "Earle's interest is not in the bigger picture of economic development so much as in the life of the capitalist in all its material and personal aspects." Sommerville went on to comment, "In the end, one is thankful for Earle's controlled generalizations, his sensible statistics and gritty detail."

Earle turns to the seafaring world in several other titles. Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650-1775 does for the life of sailors what his The Making of the English Middle Class did for the British bourgeoisie. Earle notes in his history that sailing was a hereditary trade in England at the time, and one that bred fierce pride in its practitioners. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, writing in History Today, had praise for Sailors, terming it "fluent, informative, judicious and packed with well chosen detail."

In The Pirate Wars, Earle attempts to get behind the swashbuckling fiction that has been created about buccaneers. He traces the era of pirates from the sixteenth century to the end of such piracy in the eighteenth in a work that "dismisses this myth and provides a realistic look into the malevolence of piracy and the methods nations used to bring pirates to justice," as Charles M. Minyard noted in a Library Journal review. The British were, Earle points out in the work, only one nation among others to use pirates or privateers (such as Sir Francis Drake) to carry out informal foreign policy. England's privateers harassed the fleets of Catholic Spain, just as the Corsairs, or Muslim sailors of the Levant, did to Christian ships. A Kirkus Reviews critic further commended The Pirate Wars, observing that it "offers revealing historical perspectives enlivened, but not swamped, by vivid accounts of blood-and-guts encounters." And for Robert S. Redmond, writing in the Contemporary Review, the same work was an "informative, readable book which puts piracy in true perspective." Earle focuses on one such privateer in his The Sack of Panama: Captain Morgan and the Battle for the Caribbean, which details the last of England's privateer raids on the Caribbean possessions of the Spanish. For Booklist contributor George Cohen this was "an intensely engaging account of adventure." Similarly, for a Publishers Weekly reviewer,The Sack of Panama was a "vivid and well-researched account of the great era of piracy."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Heritage, December, 1980, Richard F. Snow, review of The Treasure of the Concepcion, p. 108.

American Historical Review, December, 1982, review of The Sack of Panama: Sir Henry Morgan's Adventures on the Spanish Main, p. 1503; February, 1992, John Money, review of The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660-1730, p. 194.

Americas, August, 1980, David Buisseret, review of The Treasure of the Concepcion, p. 48.

Antiques Journal, June, 1980, review of The Treasure of the Concepcion, p. 56.

Atlantic, April, 1982, Phoebe-Lou Adams, review of The Sack of Panama, p. 108.

Booklist, November 15, 2006, George Cohen, review of The Sack of Panama, p. 20.

Business History Review, autumn, 1991, John C. Sommerville, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 696.

Canadian Journal of History, December, 1990, David Levine, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 387.

Contemporary Review, November, 2003, Robert S. Redmond, "Three Centuries of Piracy," p. 310.

Economic History Review, August, 1990, L.D. Schwarz, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 486.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, winter, 1991, Daniel Statt, review of The Making of the English Middle Class.

English Historical Review, January, 1993, D.W. Jones, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 204; November, 2003, N.A.M. Rodger, review of The Pirate Wars, p. 1394.

Historical Journal, March, 1991, Jonathan Barry, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 213.

History, October, 1990, G.C.F. Forster, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 493.

History Today, March, 1982, review of The Sack of Panama, p. 64; April, 1984, review of Essays in European Economic History, 1500-1800, p. 42; September, 1999, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, review of Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650-1775, p. 55.

Journal of British Studies, July, 1991, Julian Hoppit, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 345.

Journal of Economic Literature, March, 1990, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 136.

Journal of Modern History, September, 1992, Frank O'Gorman, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 594.

Journal of Social History, summer, 1991, Donna T. Andrew, review of The Making of the English Middle Class.

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2005, review of The Pirate Wars, p. 32.

Library Journal, January 15, 1980, John G. Kemeny, review of The Treasure of the Concepcion, p. 201; March 1, 1982, review of The Sack of Panama, p. 548; June 15, 2001, Michael Rogers, review of The Middle Ages, p. 108; February 1, 2005, Charles M. Minyard, review of The Pirate Wars, p. 96.

New Statesman & Society, August 11, 1989, John Brewer, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 29; December 20, 1991, review of Monmouth's Rebels: The Road to Sedgemoor, 1685, p. 46.

Publishers Weekly, January 22, 1982, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of The Sack of Panama, p. 56; November 20, 2006, review of The Sack of Panama, p. 52.

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2005, review of The Pirate Wars, p. 78.

School Library Journal, August, 1982, John Offen, review of The Sack of Panama, p. 133.

Sea Frontiers, September 1, 1980, review of The Treasure of the Concepcion, p. 311.

Sea Power, September, 2005, David W. Munns, review of The Pirate Wars, p. 57.

Sixteenth Century Journal, spring, 1991, Sheldon J. Watts, review of The Making of the English Middle Class.

Social History, January, 1996, John Smail, review of A City Full of People: Men and Women in London, 1650-1750, p. 108.

Social Science Quarterly, September, 1990, Robert Willman, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 656.

Thought, March, 1992, Nancy Curtin, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 88.

Times Educational Supplement, June 3, 1994, Leon Garfield, review of A City Full of People, p. 12.

Times Literary Supplement, July 7, 1989, T.C. Barker, review of The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 743; August 7, 1992, N.A.M. Rodger, review of The Last Fight of the Revenge, p. 23; September 16, 1994, Peter Linebaugh, review of A City Full of People, p. 24; August 7, 1998, review of Sailors, p. 24.