Montesquieu and England

Montesquieu and England
Author: Ursula Haskins Gonthier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2015-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317313771

Gonthier sets Montesquieu's work in the context of early eighteenth-century Anglo-French relations, taking a comparative approach to show how Montesquieu's engagement with English thought and writing persisted throughout his writing career.

The Channel

The Channel
Author: Renaud Morieux
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2016-03-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316489736

Rather than a natural frontier between natural enemies, this book approaches the English Channel as a shared space, which mediated the multiple relations between France and England in the long eighteenth century, in both a metaphorical and a material sense. Instead of arguing that Britain's insularity kept it spatially and intellectually segregated from the Continent, Renaud Morieux focuses on the Channel as a zone of contact. The 'narrow sea' was a shifting frontier between states and a space of exchange between populations. This richly textured history shows how the maritime border was imagined by cartographers and legal theorists, delimited by state administrators and transgressed by migrants. It approaches French and English fishermen, smugglers and merchants as transnational actors, whose everyday practices were entangled. The variation of scales of analysis enriches theoretical and empirical understandings of Anglo-French relations, and reassesses the question of Britain's deep historical connections with Europe.

Translating Empire

Translating Empire
Author: Sophus A. Reinert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2011-10-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674063236

Historians have traditionally used the discourses of free trade and laissez faire to explain the development of political economy during the Enlightenment. But from Sophus Reinert’s perspective, eighteenth-century political economy can be understood only in the context of the often brutal imperial rivalries then unfolding in Europe and its former colonies and the positive consequences of active economic policy. The idea of economic emulation was the prism through which philosophers, ministers, reformers, and even merchants thought about economics, as well as industrial policy and reform, in the early modern period. With the rise of the British Empire, European powers and others sought to selectively emulate the British model. In mapping the general history of economic translations between 1500 and 1849, and particularly tracing the successive translations of the Bristol merchant John Cary’s seminal 1695 Essay on the State of England, Reinert makes a compelling case for the way that England’s aggressively nationalist policies, especially extensive tariffs and other intrusive market interventions, were adopted in France, Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia before providing the blueprint for independence in the New World. Relatively forgotten today, Cary’s work served as the basis for an international move toward using political economy as the prime tool of policymaking and industrial expansion. Reinert’s work challenges previous narratives about the origins of political economy and invites the current generation of economists to reexamine the foundations, and future, of their discipline.

Politics and Culture in 18th-Century Anglo-Italian Encounters

Politics and Culture in 18th-Century Anglo-Italian Encounters
Author: Lidia De Michelis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527535479

This collection addresses Anglo-Italian influences, correspondences and relationships through the lens of an expansive notion of eighteenth-century political history, explored in its fecund dialogue with cultural history. Its multifaceted approach fleshes out the idea of the Enlightenment community of people linking and sharing different forms and structures of knowledge into a comprehensive picture of the Age of Reason. This book probes fields of great relevance for the cultural interpretation of historical experience, and composes a lively, and as yet unexplored, map of an interconnected European world. Anglo-Italian encounters are explored here primarily through the interweaving of political and cultural history, adding a valuable cog to contemporary insight into the cosmopolitan nature of Enlightenment Europe. The essays here range in scope from the public economy and international trade to finance, moral philosophy, the ethics and politics of translation, travel, the cosmopolitan impact of Italian music and taste, and the art of gardening.

The Imagined Empire

The Imagined Empire
Author: Mi Gyung Kim
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2016-12-23
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822981955

The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This popular frenzy for balloon experiments, which attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together. The Imagined Empire explores how this material artifact, the flying machine, not only expanded the public for science and spectacle but inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon, Mi Gyung Kim argues, was a people-machine, a cultural performance that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation. This critical history of ballooning considers how a relatively simple mechanical gadget became an explosive cultural and political phenomenon on the eve of the French Revolution.

Fénelon in the Enlightenment: Traditions, Adaptations, and Variations

Fénelon in the Enlightenment: Traditions, Adaptations, and Variations
Author: Christoph Schmitt-Maaß
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2014-10-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 9401210640

François Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai (1651–1715) exerted a considerable influence on the development and spread of the Enlightenment. His most famous work, the Homeric novel Les Aventures de Télémaque, Fils d’Ulysse (1699), composed for the education of his pupil Duc de Bourgogne, was, after the Bible, the most widely read literary work in France throughout the eighteenth century. It was also translated and adapted into many other European languages. And yet oddly enough, the question as to why Fénelon’s ideas resonated over such a wide span of space and time has as yet found no coherent and comprehensive answer. By taking Fénelon’s intellectual influence as a matter of ‘cultural translation’, this anthology traces the reception of Fénelon and his multifaceted writings outside of France, and in doing so aims to enrich not only our understanding of the Enlightenment, but also of the thinker himself.

Entrepôt of Revolutions

Entrepôt of Revolutions
Author: Manuel Covo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2022
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0197626386

The Age of Revolutions has been celebrated for the momentous transition from absolute monarchies to representative governments and the creation of nation-states in the Atlantic world. Much less recognized than the spread of democratic ideals was the period's growing traffic of goods, capital, and people across imperial borders and reforming states' attempts to control this mobility. Analyzing the American, French, and Haitian revolutions in an interconnected narrative, Manuel Covo centers imperial trade as a driving force, arguing that commercial factors preceded and conditioned political change across the revolutionary Atlantic. At the heart of these transformations was the entrepôt, the island known as the Pearl of the Caribbean, whose economy grew dramatically as a direct consequence of the American Revolution and the French-American alliance. Saint-Domingue was the single most profitable colony in the Americas in the second half of the eighteenth century, with its staggering production of sugar and coffee and the unpaid labor of enslaved people. The colony was so focused on its lucrative exports that it needed to import food and timber from North America, which generated enormous debate in France about the nature of its sovereignty over Saint-Domingue. At the same time, the newly independent United States had to come to terms with contradictory interests between the imperial ambitions of European powers, its connections with the Caribbean, and its own domestic debates over the future of slavery. This work sheds light on the three-way struggle among France, the United States, and Haiti to assert, define, and maintain commercial sovereignty. Drawing on a wealth of archives in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Entrepôt of Revolutions offers an innovative perspective on the primacy of economic factors in this era, as politicians and theorists, planters and merchants, ship captains, smugglers, and the formerly enslaved all attempted to transform capitalism in the Atlantic world.

France and America in the Revolutionary Era

France and America in the Revolutionary Era
Author: Thomas J. Schaeper
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 412
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781571810502

"... a well-written and thoroughly researched biography of a 'forgotten Frenchman' ... Schaeper wades masterfully through the conflicting evidence and interpretations and produces an admirable synthesis of recent scholarship on the French-American alliance ... also presents excellent background on the many aspects of the prewar French economy ..." - William and Mary Quarterly This is the first detailed study account of the life and career of Chaumont whose chief claim to fame was the fact that from 1777 to 1785 Benjamin Franklin livedin his home in the Parisian suburb of Passy. Basing his work on documents from two dozen archives in the United States and France, Schaeper demonstrates that Chaumont was far more than merely a landlord. Prior to the American Revolution he had become one of the most powerful and respected businessmen of the Old Regime. For personal as well as patriotic reasons he aided the American insurgents and worked with a wide array of persons. In addition to Franklin, these included John Adams, Silas Deane, Caron de Beaumarchais, the marquis de Lafayette and the comte de Vergennes. Chaumont performed an astounding range of services - acting as intermediary, an adviser, and a supplier of arms and clothing. His most dramatic contribution to the American cause involved John Paul Jones. It was Chaumont who obtained the famous Bonhomme Richard for the commodore. Through looking at the activities of this intriguing individual the author is able to offer many new insights into both American and French history. Lively and well written this biography will appeal to both the historian and the general reader. Thomas J. Schaeper, Professor of History at St. Bonaventure University and a member of the board of French Historical Studies. His previous books include The Economy of France in the Second Half of the Reign of Louis XIV (1980) and John Paul Jones and the Battle of Flamborough Head: A Reconsideration (1989).