Merchants of Medicines

Merchants of Medicines
Author: Zachary Dorner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 022670680X

The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare. In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.

Merchants and the Military in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Merchants and the Military in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Author: Gordon Bannerman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317314565

Investigates the contract sector of the British Army during the long eighteenth century. This book argues that this group of financiers, private merchants, businessmen and farmers represented a vital interest group which was at the nexus of the fiscal-military structure. It draws on papers from the War Office, the Treasury and the Audit Office.

Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law

Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2019-11-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004416641

Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law examines the connections that existed between merchants’ journeys, the languages they used and the development of commercial law in the context of late medieval and early modern trade. The book, edited by Stefania Gialdroni, Albrecht Cordes, Serge Dauchy, Dave De ruysscher and Heikki Pihlajamäki, takes advantage of the expertise of leading scholars in different fields of study, in particular historians, legal historians and linguists. Thanks to this transdisciplinary approach, the book offers a fresh point of view on the history of commercial law in different cultural and geographical contexts, including medieval Cairo, Pisa, Novgorod, Lübeck, early modern England, Venice, Bruges, nineteenth century Brazil and many other trading centers. Contributors are Cornelia Aust, Guido Cifoletti, Mark R. Cohen, Albrecht Cordes, Maria Fusaro, Stefania Gialdroni, Mark Häberlein, Uwe Israel, Bart Lambert, David von Mayenburg, Hanna Sonkajärvi, and Catherine Squires.

Empire of Guns

Empire of Guns
Author: Priya Satia
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 569
Release: 2018-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0735221871

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE By a prize-winning young historian, an authoritative work that reframes the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of British empire, and emergence of industrial capitalism by presenting them as inextricable from the gun trade "A fascinating and important glimpse into how violence fueled the industrial revolution, Priya Satia's book stuns with deep scholarship and sparkling prose."--Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, upends this conventional wisdom by placing war and Britain's prosperous gun trade at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the state's imperial expansion. Satia brings to life this bustling industrial society with the story of a scandal: Samuel Galton of Birmingham, one of Britain's most prominent gunmakers, has been condemned by his fellow Quakers, who argue that his profession violates the society's pacifist principles. In his fervent self-defense, Galton argues that the state's heavy reliance on industry for all of its war needs means that every member of the British industrial economy is implicated in Britain's near-constant state of war. Empire of Guns uses the story of Galton and the gun trade, from Birmingham to the outermost edges of the British empire, to illuminate the nation's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the state's role in economic development, and the origins of our era's debates about gun control and the "military-industrial complex" -- that thorny partnership of government, the economy, and the military. Through Satia's eyes, we acquire a radically new understanding of this critical historical moment and all that followed from it. Sweeping in its scope and entirely original in its approach, Empire of Guns is a masterful new work of history -- a rigorous historical argument with a human story at its heart.

Merchants and the Military in Eighteenth-century Britain

Merchants and the Military in Eighteenth-century Britain
Author: Gordon Bannerman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008
Genre: Business logistics
ISBN: 9781851969371

Investigates the contract sector of the British Army during the long eighteenth century. This book argues that this group of financiers, private merchants, businessmen and farmers represented a vital interest group which was at the nexus of the fiscal-military structure. It draws on papers from the War Office, the Treasury and the Audit Office.

War in the Eighteenth-Century World

War in the Eighteenth-Century World
Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2012-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230370004

Placing eighteenth-century warfare in a truly global context, Jeremy Black challenges conventional accounts and offers a reappraisal of debates in Western and Asian history. This concise, up-to-date survey assumes little prior knowledge and provides cutting-edge historical insights into a crucial period of world history.

The British Fiscal-Military States, 1660-c.1783

The British Fiscal-Military States, 1660-c.1783
Author: Aaron Graham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2016-05-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 131703984X

The concept of the 'fiscal-military state', popularised by John Brewer in 1989, has become familiar, even commonplace, to many historians of eighteenth-century England. Yet even at the time of its publication the book caused controversy, and the essays in this volume demonstrate how recent work on fiscal structures, military and naval contractors, on parallel developments in Scotland and Ireland, and on the wider political context, has challenged the fundamentals of this model in increasingly sophisticated and nuanced ways. Beginning with a historiographical introduction that places The Sinews of Power and subsequent work on the fiscal-military state within its wider contexts, and a commentary by John Brewer that responds to the questions raised by this work, the chapters in this volume explore topics as varied as finance and revenue, the interaction of the state with society, the relations between the military and its contractors, and even the utility of the concept of the fiscal-military state. It concludes with an afterword by Professor Stephen Conway, situating the essays in comparative contexts, and highlighting potential avenues for future research. Taken as a whole, this volume offers challenging and imaginative new perspectives on the fiscal-military structures that underpinned the development of modern European states from the eighteenth century onwards.

Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century

Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century
Author: David Wilson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 1783275952

This book charts the surge and decline in piracy in the early eighteenth century (the so-called "Golden Age" of piracy), exploring the ways in which pirates encountered, obstructed, and antagonised the diverse participants of the British empire in the Caribbean, North America, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. The book's primary focus is on how anti-piracy campaigns were constructed as a result of the negotiations, conflicts, and individual undertakings of different imperial actors operating in the commercial and imperial hub of London; maritime communities throughout the British Atlantic; trading outposts in West Africa and India; and marginal and contested zones such as the Bahamas, Madagascar, and the Bay Islands. It argues that Britain and its empire was not a strong centralised imperial state; that the British imperial administration and the Royal Navy did not have the resources to mount a state-led, empire-wide war against piracy following the sharp increase in piratical attacks after 1716; and that it was only through manifold activities taking place in different colonial centres with varied colonial arrangements, economic strengths, and access to resources for maritime defence - which was often shaped by competing and contradictory interests - that Atlantic piracy was gradually discouraged, although not eradicated, by the mid-1720s.

The Early Modern State: Drivers, Beneficiaries and Discontents

The Early Modern State: Drivers, Beneficiaries and Discontents
Author: Pepijn Brandon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 100058593X

In the course of the early modern period, the capacity of European states to raise finances, wage wars, subject their own and far away populations, and exert bureaucratic power over a variety of areas of social life increased dramatically. Nevertheless, these changes were far less absolute and definitive than the literature on the rise of the "modern state" once held. While war pushed the boundaries of the emerging fiscal military states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rulers remained highly dependent on negotiations with competing elite groups and the private networks of contractors and financial intermediaries. Attempts to increase control over subjects often resulted in popular resistance, that in their turn set limits to and influenced the direction of the development of state institutions. Written in honour of the leading historian of war and state formation in the early modern Low Countries, Marjolein 't Hart, the chapters gathered in this volume examine the main drivers, beneficiaries and discontents of state formation across and beyond Europe in the early modern period.

Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century

Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century
Author: Rafael Torres Sánchez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198784112

Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century offers a new approach to the relationship between warfare and state construction. Historians looking at how war funding impinged on state development, and how state growth made wars more significant, have tended to downplay the role of military-provisioning entrepreneurs. Written off as corrupt and selfish, these entrepreneurs jarred with the received view of a rationally growing and modernising state. This volume shows that the state-entrepreneur relationship was much more fluid and constant than previously thought. The state was not able to enforce a top-down military supply policy; at the same time it benefited from the entrepreneurs' collaboration and their shared mercantilist ambitions. The entrepreneurs' mobilisation of military supplies was crucial for extending state authority and helped to knit together national and colonial markets. But this fluid state-entrepreneur relationship gradually became shrouded in privileges and monopolies, not so much ideology driven or imposed by the entrepreneurs but rather as an arrangement exploited by the state to boost its control over them, whittling down middlemen and ensuring the solvency and creditworthiness of the chosen few. This arrangement spiralled into a risky inter-dependence and cramped entrepreneurial competition. Rafael Torres Sanchez furnishes new insights into the role of military entrepreneurs in debates about warfare and state construction.