Download or read book War and British Society 1688 1815 written by H. V. Bowen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-03-28 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a large volume of research, this 1998 book considers sustained warfare as a powerful agent of change which transformed a wide range of institutions, structures, and processes in Britain between 1688 and 1815, a period when Britain was at war for much of the time. Stressing the positive as well as the negative, and the long term as well as the short term, the effects of war are brought to bear upon questions of central importance in the study of eighteenth-century British history. How effectively did the emerging state cope with the financial and logistical demands of war? How severe were the economic and social strains imposed upon the population at large, and how did they respond to the call to arms? What effect did war have upon the industrialising economy? A balanced overview is presented of Britain as a nation at war during an important phase of her development as an imperial, industrial and military power.
Download or read book British Society and the French Wars 1793 1815 written by Clive Emsley and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Eighteenth Century written by Paul Langford and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume takes a thematic approach to the history of the eighteenth century in the British Isles, covering such issues as domestic politics (including popular political culture), religious developments and change, and social and demographic structure and growth. Paul Langford heads a leading team of contributors, to present a lively picture of an era of intense change and growth in which all parts of Britain and Ireland were increasingly bound together by economic expansion and political unification.
Download or read book The Crucible of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Warfare and European Transitions to Modern Economic Growth written by Patrick Karl O'Brien and published by Library of Economic History. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Historiographically, this book rests on the fact that European transitions to modern economic growth were obstructed and promoted by the Revolution in France and 15 years of geopolitical conflict sustained by Napoleon in order to establish French Hegemony over the states and economies of Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and overseas commerce. The chapters reveal that the nature and significance of connections between geopolitical and economic forces lend coherence to a collaborative endeavour utilising comparative methods to address a mega question: What might be plausibly concluded about the economic costs and the benefits of this protracted conjuncture of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Warfare?"--
Download or read book The Eighteenth Century written by T. C. W Blanning and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete Short Oxford History of Europe (series editor: Professor T.C.W. Blanning) will cover the history of Europe from Classical Greece to the present in eleven volumes. In each, experts write to their strengths tackling the key issues including society, economy, religion, politics,and culture head-on in chapters that will be at once wide-ranging surveys and searching analyses. Each book is specifically designed with the non-specialist reader in mind; but the authority of the contributors and the vigour of the interpretations will make them necessary and challenging readingfor fellow academics across a range of disciplines.The word which best summarizes the wonderful variety of human experience in the eighteenth century is `expansion'. The size of armies, literacy rates, state intervention, the acreage of overseas empires, productivity or just the number of Europeans on the planet were all significantly higher in1800 than in 1700. It is the century which forms the hinge between the old world and the new for, by its end, change was not only detectable, it was also seen to be irreversible. In this book, six experts analyse concisely and incisively the major developments in politics, society, the economy,religion and culture, warfare and international relations, and in Europe's relations with the world overseas.
Download or read book Geographies of an Imperial Power written by Jeremy Black and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-06 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geography as an underpinning of British imperialism. “The breadth and depth of knowledge on display in this book are impressive.” —Historical Geography From explorers tracing rivers to navigators hunting for longitude, spatial awareness and the need for empirical understanding were linked to British strategy in the 1700s. This strategy, in turn, aided in the assertion of British power and authority on a global scale. In this sweeping consideration of Britain in the 18th century, Jeremy Black explores the interconnected roles of power and geography in the creation of a global empire. Geography was at the heart of Britain’s expansion into India, its response to uprisings in Scotland and America, and its revolutionary development of railways. Geographical dominance was reinforced as newspapers stoked the fires of xenophobia and defined the limits of cosmopolitan Europe as compared to the “barbarism” beyond. Geography provided a system of analysis and classification which gave Britain political, cultural, and scientific sovereignty. Black considers geographical knowledge not just as a tool for creating a shared cultural identity but also as a key mechanism in the formation of one of the most powerful and far-reaching empires the world has ever known. “This is an engaging, wide-ranging, clearly written, well-informed book . . . Recommended.” —Choice
Download or read book War State and Society in Mid Eighteenth Century Britain and Ireland written by Stephen Conway and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-01-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the impact of the wars of 1739-63 on Britain and Ireland. The period was dominated by armed struggle between Britain and the Bourbon powers, particularly France. These wars, especially the Seven Years War of 1756-63, saw a considerable mobilization of manpower, materiel and money. They had important affects on the British and Irish economies, on social divisions and the development of what we might term social policy, on popular and parliamentary politics, on religion, on national sentiment, and on the nature and scale of Britain's overseas possessions and attitudes to empire. To fight these wars, partnerships of various kinds were necessary. Partnership with European allies was recognized, at least by parts of the political nation, to be essential to the pursuit of victory. Partnership with the North American colonies was also seen as imperative to military success. Within Britain and Ireland, partnerships were no less important. The peoples of the different nations of the two islands were forced into partnership, or entered into it willingly, in order to fight the conflicts of the period and to resist Bourbon invasion threats. At the level of 'high' politics, the Seven Years War saw the forming of an informal partnership between Whigs and Tories in support of the Pitt-Newcastle government's prosecution of the war. The various Protestant denominations - established churches and Dissenters - were brought into a form of partnership based on Protestant solidarity in the face of the Catholic threat from France and Spain. And, perhaps above all, partnerships were forged between the British state and local and private interest in order to secure the necessary mobilization of men, resources, and money.
Download or read book Indentured to Liberty written by Peter Keir Taylor and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taylor reconstructs the world of these peasants and their families.
Download or read book Patriotism and Pathos written by John Bonehill and published by . This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patriotism and Pathos: War, British Society and the Visual Arts, c. 1688-1830 offers the first comprehensive account of the visual imagery of war in Britain during 'the long eighteenth century'. Drawing on a wealth of unseen primary documentation, as well as more familiar historical and art historical secondary-source material, the book focuses on three main phases of national project: the Glorious Revolution to the beginning of the Seven Years' War (1688-1756); from that point to the loss of America (1756-1775); thence to the victory at Waterloo (1776-1815). The authors consider various key socio-historical themes – nationalism, empire, sexuality, race – whilst also addressing some of the particular conventions of genre, namely through the examination of portraiture and landscape. Numerous facets of visual culture are emplored together – paintings, tombs, commemorative ceramics, busts, civic monuments, satirical prints and recruiting posters – to elucidate not only the way in which art of the period reflected the processes of war but also how that art actually functioned in the formation of a militarized society.
Download or read book Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution written by Jane Humphries and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-24 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution, first published in 2010. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialisation, 1790–1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanisation and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large subsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together. The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers and schooling. Its images of suffering, stoicism and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.
Download or read book The British Isles and the War of American Independence written by Stephen Conway and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-03-02 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a hitherto neglected aspect of the War of American Independence, providing the first wide-ranging account of the impact of this eighteenth-century conflict upon the politics, economy, society and culture of the British Isles. The author examines the level of military participation - which was much greater than is usually appreciated - and explores the war's effects on subjects as varied as parliamentary reform, religious toleration and attitudes to empire. The books casts new light upon recent debate about the war-waging efficiency of the British state, and on the role of war in the creation of a sense of 'Britishness'. The thematic chapters are supplemented by local case studies of six very different communities the length and breadth of the British Isles.
Download or read book Constructing a Fiscal Military State in Eighteenth Century Spain written by Rafael Torres Sánchez and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-25 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically, Spain has often been represented as a financial failure, a state limited by its absolutist monarchy and doomed to fiscal and financial failure without hope of lasting growth. The collapse of the Spanish state at the beginning of the nineteenth century would seem to bear out this view of the limitations of Spain's absolutist state, and this historical school of thought presents the eighteenth century as the last episode in a long history of decline that is directly linked to the failure of the sixteenth-century Spanish imperial absolutist monarchy. This study provides a different perspective, suggesting that in fact during the eighteenth century, Spain's fiscal-military state was reconstructed and grew. It shows how the development of the Spanish fiscal-military state was based on different growth factors to those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and that with this change, most of the state's structure and its relationship with élites and taxpayers altered irrevocably. In the ceaseless search for solutions, the Spanish state applied a wide range of financial and fiscal policies to expand its empire. The research in this book is inspired by current historical discussions, and provides a new perspective on the historical debate that often compares English 'success' with continental 'failure'.
Download or read book British Romanticism and Peace written by John Bugg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to bring perspectives from the interdisciplinary field of Peace Studies to bear on the writing of the Romantic period. Particularly significant is that field's attention not only to the work of anti-war protest, but more purposefully to considerations of how peace can actively be fostered, established, and sustained. Bravely resisting discourses of military propaganda, writers such as Amelia Opie, Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, William Cobbett, John Keats, and Jane Austen embarked on the challenging and urgent rhetorical work of imagining—and inspiring others to imagine—the possibility of peace. The writers formulate a peace imaginary in various registers. Sometimes this means identifying and eschewing traditional militaristic tropes in order to craft alternative images for a patriotism compatible with peace. Other times it means turning away from xenophobic discourse to write about relations with other nations in terms other than those of conflict. If historically informed literary criticism has illustrated the importance of writing about war during the Romantic period, this volume invites readers to redirect critical attention to move beyond discourses of war, and to recognize the era's complex and vibrant writing about and for peace.
Download or read book The Currency of Politics written by Stefan Eich and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-22 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Money in the history of political thought, from ancient Greece to the Great Inflation of the 1970s In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, critical attention has shifted from the economy to the most fundamental feature of all market economies—money. Yet despite the centrality of political struggles over money, it remains difficult to articulate its democratic possibilities and limits. The Currency of Politics takes readers from ancient Greece to today to provide an intellectual history of money, drawing on the insights of key political philosophers to show how money is not just a medium of exchange but also a central institution of political rule. Money appears to be beyond the reach of democratic politics, but this appearance—like so much about money—is deceptive. Even when the politics of money is impossible to ignore, its proper democratic role can be difficult to discern. Stefan Eich examines six crucial episodes of monetary crisis, recovering the neglected political theories of money in the thought of such figures as Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He shows how these layers of crisis have come to define the way we look at money, and argues that informed public debate about money requires a better appreciation of the diverse political struggles over its meaning. Recovering foundational ideas at the intersection of monetary rule and democratic politics, The Currency of Politics explains why only through greater awareness of the historical limits of monetary politics can we begin to articulate more democratic conceptions of money.
Download or read book The Imperial Nation written by Josep M. Fradera and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the legacy of monarchical empires shaped Britain, France, Spain, and the United States as they became liberal entities Historians view the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a turning point when imperial monarchies collapsed and modern nations emerged. Treating this pivotal moment as a bridge rather than a break, The Imperial Nation offers a sweeping examination of four of these modern powers—Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—and asks how, after the great revolutionary cycle in Europe and America, the history of monarchical empires shaped these new nations. Josep Fradera explores this transition, paying particular attention to the relations between imperial centers and their sovereign territories and the constant and changing distinctions placed between citizens and subjects. Fradera argues that the essential struggle that lasted from the Seven Years’ War to the twentieth century was over the governance of dispersed and varied peoples: each empire tried to ensure domination through subordinate representation or by denying any representation at all. The most common approach echoed Napoleon’s “special laws,” which allowed France to reinstate slavery in its Caribbean possessions. The Spanish and Portuguese constitutions adopted “specialness” in the 1830s; the United States used comparable guidelines to distinguish between states, territories, and Indian reservations; and the British similarly ruled their dominions and colonies. In all these empires, the mix of indigenous peoples, European-origin populations, slaves and indentured workers, immigrants, and unassimilated social groups led to unequal and hierarchical political relations. Fradera considers not only political and constitutional transformations but also their social underpinnings. Presenting a fresh perspective on the ways in which nations descended and evolved from and throughout empires, The Imperial Nation highlights the ramifications of this entangled history for the subjects who lived in its shadows.
Download or read book Mercenaries written by Sarah Percy and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-10-11 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main aim of this book is to argue that the use of private force by states has been restricted by a norm against mercenary use. The book traces the evolution of this norm, from mercenaries in medieval Europe through to private security companies in modern day Iraq, telling a story about how the mercenaries of yesterday have evolved into those of today in the process. The norm against mercenaries has two components. First, mercenaries are considered to be immoral because they use force outside legitimate, authoritative control. Second, mercenaries are considered to be morally problematic because they fight wars for selfish, financial reasons as opposed to fighting for some kind of larger conception of the common good. The book examines four puzzles about mercenary use, and argues that they can only be explained by understanding the norm against mercenaries. First, the book argues that moral disapproval of mercenaries led to the disappearance of independent mercenaries from medieval Europe. Second, the transition from armies composed of mercenaries to citizen armies in the nineteenth century can only be understood with attention to the norm against mercenaries. Third, it is impossible to understand why international law regarding mercenaries, created in the 1970s and 1980s, is so ineffective without understanding the norm. Finally, the disappearance of companies like Executive Outcomes and Sandline and the development of today's private security industry cannot be understood without the norm. This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.
Download or read book The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture 1780 1835 written by Neil Ramsey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.
