Joseph P. Ward is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History of the University of Mississippi, USA. His previous publications include Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity and Change in Early Modern London and, with Robert Bucholz, London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750.

Contemporary observers have noted that land, for centuries the foundation of economic and political power, changed hands at a quickening pace in England during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As new money - and therefore new people - came into the land market, the social foundations of government shifted, which led inevitably to political crisis. Empowered by new wealth and by their faith, early modern Londoners began to use philanthropy to assert their cultural authority in distant parts of the nation. Culture, Faith, and Philanthropy analyzes how disputes between London and provincial authorities over such benefactions demonstrated the often tense relations between center and periphery.