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The outbreak of revolution in Paris in 1789 forced Britain into a political and military conflict that had a profound impact on politics, economy, public discourse and cultural life well into the 19th century. The essays collected here examine the various responses to the revolution and the significant changes wrought within Britain by the events. Some essays discuss the ideological divisions within Britain and Ireland. Others take a closer look at the media and the debate on the press, and reinvestigate responses to the revolution by prominent contemporaries such as William Godwin, Dugald Stewart, and William Wordsworth.
The last four decades of the 18th century witnessed a sudden acceleration in the pace of change in the political cultures of England and Germany. The ways in which developments in the two countries diverged are the subject of this collection of essays by leading scholars from England, North America, and Germany. The book examines a wide range of phenomena: the ideological stock of the period; the structure of contemporary communications and the contemporary media; the institutional setting of politicization; forms of political association; political self-organization; and political strategies, activities, techniques, and rituals.
The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd tells the remarkable story of a complex forgery uncovered in London in 1775. Like the trials of Martin Guerre and O.J. Simpson, the Perreau-Rudd case—filled with scandal, deceit, and mystery—preoccupied a public hungry for sensationalism. Peopled with such familiar figures as John Wilkes, King George III, Lord Mansfield, and James Boswell, this story reveals the deep anxieties of this period of English capitalism. The case acts as a prism that reveals the hopes, fears, and prejudices of that society. Above all, this episode presents a parable of the 1770s, when London was the center of European finance and national politics, of fashionable life and tell-all jou...
This collection contains the first English translations of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present. In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have condemned the Enlightenment for its complicity with any number of present-day social and cultural maladies. It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun...
This book discusses the revolutionary broadening of concepts of freedom of press and freedom of speech in Great Britain and in America in the late eighteenth century, in the period that produced state declarations of rights and then the First Amendment and Fox's Libel Act. The conventional view of the history of freedoms of press and speech is that the common law since antiquity defined those freedoms narrowly, and that Sir William Blackstone in 1769, and Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in 1770, faithfully summarized the common law in giving a very narrow definition of those freedoms as mere liberty from prior restraint and not liberty from punishment after something was printed or spoken. This...
The question of whether Britain is "apart from or a part of Europe" (D. Abulafia) has gained significance in recent years. This book reassesses an underexplored field of early modern transnational history: the variety of ways in which connections between Britain and German-speaking Europe shaped developments. After a comprehensive introduction, this book is divided into three parts: cross-border transfers and appropriations of knowledge; coping with alterity in intergovernmental contacts; and ideologising the cultural nation. The topics range from the exchange of religious and political ideas over court life, diplomacy, and espionage to literary and philosophical debates. Particular attentio...
This volume seeks to get behind the surface of political events and to identify the forces which shaped politics and culture from 1680 to 1840 in Germany, France and Great Britain. The contributors, all leading specialists in the field, explore critically how 'culture', defined in the widest sense, was exploited during the 'long eighteenth century' to buttress authority in all its forms and how politics infused culture. Individual essays explore topics ranging from the military culture of Central Europe through the political culture of Germany, France and Great Britain, music, court intrigue and diplomatic practice, religious conflict and political ideas, the role of the Enlightenment, to the very new dispensations which prevailed during and after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic watershed. The book will be essential reading for all scholars of eighteenth-century European history.
A similar book is Reidar Maliks, Kant’s Politics in Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014, but it does not focus on international law. Pauline Kleingeld’s Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012 touches upon international relations, but is mainly a book on Kant’s cosmopolitanism, and a comparison with other 18c thinkers.
In 1666, King Charles II felt it necessary to reform Englishmen's dress by introducing a fashion that developed into the three-piece suit. We learn what inspired this royal revolution in masculine attire--and the reasons for its remarkable longevity--in David Kuchta's engaging and handsomely illustrated account. Between 1550 and 1850, Kuchta says, English upper- and middle-class men understood their authority to be based in part upon the display of masculine character: how they presented themselves in public and demonstrated their masculinity helped define their political legitimacy, moral authority, and economic utility. Much has been written about the ways political culture, religion, and ...
This book examines the public battle sparked by the promulgation in 1788 of Prussia's Edict on Religion. Historians have seen in this moment nothing less than the end of the Enlightenment in Prussia. This book begs to differ and argues that social control had a long "enlightened" pedigree. Using both archival and published documents this book reveals deeply the entire Prussian elite was invested in social control of the masses, especially in the public sphere. What emerges is a picture of the Enlightenment in Prussia as a conservative enterprise that was limited by not merely the state but also the social anxieties of the Prussian elite.