Perry Gauci's carefully researched monograph on Great Yarmouth is ... a welcome addition to the burgeoning historiography, a timely response to the plea made a few years back 'for "a social history of politics" to address the causes of late seventeenth-century conflict' ... If the structural chapters offer important revisionist insights into our understanding of unreformed municipal governments, the narrative section sheds valuable light on the nature of political conflict in the later Stuart era ... this is a fine study which gives us much food for thought.

Tim Harris, Brown University, Parliamentary History, Vol. 16, pt 2, 1997

a new and challenging perspective on the political history of this period ... This book is also a valuable corrective to the stereotyped view of eighteenth-century corporations as oligarchies in a state of terminal decline.

R.H. Sweet, St John's College, Oxford, Urban History, Vol. 24, Part 2 - 1997

important, scholarly and well-written book ... fine book

Jeremy Black, University of Exeter, BJECS 20.2 (1997)