HIST 231: Imagining Enlightenment in 18th-Century Europe (HC)

Part I of this new double volume traces the development of politics and opinion in the final crisis of the Old Regime in the great states of Western Europe--Great Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal. The second part extends the narrative to Eastern Europe. It discusses the growing movement of republican patriotism and the attempt to reform the Hapsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Empires. As previously, this historical drama is viewed through Italian publishing and journalism that observed a cosmopolitan world from Turin, Venice, Milan, Florence, Rome, and Naples and that intelligently interpreted it.

The Enlightenment has often been written about as a sequence of disembodied "great ideas". The aim of this book is to put the beliefs of the Enlightenment firmly into their social context, by revealing the national soils in which they were rooted and the specific purposes for which they were used. It brings out the regional divergences of the Enlightenment experience, shaped by different local intellectual and economic priorities. At the same time it also shows how central concerns (with virtue, patriotism, liberty and modernisation) were shared everywhere, and how the writings of certain key areas (such as France and England) came to be influential elsewhere.

This book examines the political works of Andrew Michael Ramsay (1683-1743) within the context of early eighteenth century British and French political thought. The author uses Ramsay to engage in a broader evaluation of the theory in the two countries and the exchange between them.At the beginning of the eighteenth century Britain and France were on divergent paths of political sovereignty.

What role did visual artists play in the emergence and spread of nationalism and a sense of national identity? Focusing on late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Britain and France, this original study in the historical sociology of nations and nationalism analyses the contributions of artists in these and other West European countries to the creation of memorable images of the abstract concept of the nation. By employing different modes of depiction for conveying moral lessons, evoking the atmosphere of the homeland, and commemorating the fallen in battle artists made the national idea appear palpable and accessible.

One of the most dramatic images of the French Revolution is of Parisian market women dragging cannons as they marched on Versailles and returned with bread and the king. These market women sold essential foodstuffs to the residents of the capital but, equally important, through their political and economic engagement, held great revolutionary influence.

This book offers a new interpretation of political reform in Spain and its American empire in the second half of the Eighteenth century. It examines the intellectual foundation of commercial, administrative and colonial policy during the tumultuous reigns of Charles III and Charles IV.

Telling the story of naturalization from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Unnaturally French offers an original interpretation of the continuities and ruptures of absolutist and modern citizenship, in the process challenging the historiographical centrality of the French Revolution. In his political history of the making and unmaking of the French absolute monarchy, Sahlins considers the shifting policies toward immigrants, foreign citizens, and state membership. Sahlins argues that the absolute citizen, exemplified in Louis XIV's attempt to tax all foreigners in 1697, gave way to new practices in the middle of the eighteenth century. This "citizenship revolution," long before 1789, produced changes in private and in political culture that led to the abolition of the distinction between foreigners and citizens. Sahlins shows how the Enlightenment and the political failure of the monarchy in France laid the foundations for the development of an exclusively political citizen, in opposition to the absolute citizen who had been above all a legal subject.