Download or read book William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire written by Stewart J. Brown and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-04-13 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an exploration of William Robertson, a leading figure in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
Download or read book William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire written by Stewart J. Brown and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an exploration of William Robertson, a leading figure in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
Download or read book Life of William Robertson written by Jeffrey R. Smitten and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-26 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first modern biography of William Robertson, a key figure of the Scottish EnlightenmentA prominent figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, William Robertson differed from his contemporaries, such as Voltaire, Hume and Gibbon, because he used the critical tools of the Enlightenment to strengthen religion, not to attack it. As an historian, he helped shape 18th-century historiography. As a minister of the Church of Scotland, he sought to make the church fit for a polite age. And, as principal of the University of Edinburgh, he presided over a flourishing of intellectual inquiry in the midst of the Enlightenment. But despite his European fame, he was a controversial figure. Drawing extensively on his unpublished correspondence, Jeffrey Smitten captures both the man and his work in his own words. By foregrounding Robertsons religious outlook, Smitten gives us a more contextualised and nuanced interpretation of Robertson's motives, intentions and beliefs than we have had before.Key Features:Includes new biographical information drawn from archival sources and from all Robertson's largely unpublished correspondenceDiscusses Robertson's works, published and unpublishedAssesses Robertson's achievement based on fresh consideration of all facets of his career as minister, historian and principal
Download or read book The First European written by Pierre Briant and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A truly remarkable forgotten chapter of European intellectual history, laid out with passion and integrity.” (The Wall Street Journal) The exploits of Alexander the Great were so remarkable that for centuries after his death the Macedonian ruler seemed a figure more of legend than of history. Thinkers of the European Enlightenment, searching for ancient models to understand contemporary affairs, were the first to critically interpret Alexander’s achievements. As Pierre Briant shows, in the minds of eighteenth-century intellectuals and philosophers, Alexander was the first European: a successful creator of empire who opened the door to new sources of trade and scientific knowledge, and an enlightened leader who brought the fruits of Western civilization to an oppressed and backward “Orient.” In France, Scotland, England, and Germany, Alexander the Great became an important point of reference in discourses from philosophy and history to political economy and geography. Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Robertson asked what lessons Alexander’s empire-building had to teach modern Europeans. They saw the ancient Macedonian as the embodiment of the rational and benevolent Western ruler, a historical model to be emulated as Western powers accelerated their colonial expansion into Asia, India, and the Middle East. “This important work. . . . confirms once more that the life-trajectory of the Macedonian conqueror remains an inexhaustible cultural resource.” —Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Empires Between Islam and Christianity
Download or read book The Scottish People and the French Revolution written by Bob Harris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a study of the political culture of Scotland in the 1790s. This book compares the emergence of 'the people' as a political force, with popular political movements in England and Ireland. It analyses Scottish responses to the French Revolution across the political spectrum; explaining Loyalist as well as Radical opinions and organisations.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History written by T. M. Devine and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last three decades major advances in research and scholarship have transformed understanding of the Scottish past. In this landmark study some of the most eminent writers on the subject, together with emerging new talents, have combined to produce a large-scale volume which reconsiders in fresh and illuminating ways the classic themes of the nation's history since the sixteenth century as well as a number of new topics which are only now receiving detailed attention. Such major themes as the Reformation, the Union of 1707, the Scottish Enlightenment, clearances, industrialisation, empire, emigration, and the Great War are approached from novel and fascinating perspectives, but so too are such issues as the Scottish environment, myth, family, criminality, the literary tradition, and Scotland's contemporary history. All chapters contain expert syntheses of current knowledge, but their authors also stand back and reflect critically on the questions which still remain unanswered, the issues which generate dispute and controversy, and sketch out where appropriate the agenda for future research. The Handbook also places the Scottish experience firmly into an international historical perspective with a considerable focus on the age-old emigration of the Scottish people, the impact of successive waves of immigrants to Scotland, and the nation's key role within the British Empire. The overall result is a vibrant and stimulating review of modern Scottish history: essential reading for students and scholars alike.
Download or read book Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires written by L. Kontler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume takes a decentered look at early modern empires and rejects the center/periphery divide. With an unconventional geographical set of cases, including the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg, Iberian, French and British empires, as well as China, contributors seize the spatial dynamics of the scientific enterprise.
Download or read book A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography provides a survey of the most important historians and historiographical debates in the long eighteenth century, examining these debates’ stylistic, philosophical and political significance. The chapters, many of which were specially commissioned for this volume, offer a mixture of accessible introduction and original interpretive argument; they will thus appeal both to the scholar of the period and the more general reader. Part I considers Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Herder and Vico. Part II explores wider themes of national and thematic context: English, Scottish, French and German Enlightenment historians are discussed, as are the concepts of historical progress, secularism, the origins of historicism and the deployments of Greek and Roman antiquity within 18th century historiography. Contributors are Robert Mankin, Simon Kow, Jeffrey Smitten, Rebecca Kingston, Síofra Pierse, Bertrand Binoche, Donald Phillip Verene, Ulrich Muhlack, David Allan, Noelle Gallagher, François-Emmanuël Boucher, Sandra Rudnick Luft, Sophie Bourgault, C. Akça Ataç, and Robert Sparling.
Download or read book Colonialism and Its Legacies written by Jacob T. Levy and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonialism and Its Legacy brings together essays by leading scholars in both the fields of political theory and the history of political thought about European colonialism and its legacies, and postcolonial social and political theory. The essays explore the ways in which European colonial projects structured and shaped much of modern political theory, how concepts from political philosophy affected and were realized in colonial and imperial practice, and how we can understand the intellectual and social world left behind by a half-millennium of European empires. The volume ranges from the beginning of modernity to the present day, examining colonialism and colonial legacies in India, Africa, Latin America, and North America.
Download or read book Barbarism and Religion Volume 4 Barbarians Savages and Empires written by J. G. A. Pocock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-27 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Barbarism and Religion' - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of a sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. In the fourth volume in the sequence, first published in 2005, Pocock argues that barbarism was central to the history of western historiography, to the history of the Enlightenment, and to Edward Gibbon himself. As a concept it was deeply problematic to Enlightened historians seeking to understand their own civilised societies in the light of exposure to newly discovered civilisations which were, until then, beyond the reach of history itself.
Download or read book Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment written by Iain McDaniel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although overshadowed by his contemporaries Adam Smith and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson strongly influenced eighteenth-century currents of political thought. A major reassessment of this neglected figure, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future sheds new light on Ferguson as a serious critic, rather than an advocate, of the Enlightenment belief in liberal progress. Unlike the philosophes who looked upon Europe’s growing prosperity and saw confirmation of a utopian future, Ferguson saw something else: a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship. Ferguson viewed the intrinsic power struggle between civil and military authorities as the central dilemma of modern constitutional governments. He believed that the key to understanding the forces that propel nations toward tyranny lay in analysis of ancient Roman history. It was the alliance between popular and militaristic factions within the Roman republic, Ferguson believed, which ultimately precipitated its downfall. Democratic forces, intended as a means of liberation from tyranny, could all too easily become the engine of political oppression—a fear that proved prescient when the French Revolution spawned the expansionist wars of Napoleon. As Iain McDaniel makes clear, Ferguson’s skepticism about the ability of constitutional states to weather pervasive conditions of warfare and emergency has particular relevance for twenty-first-century geopolitics. This revelatory study will resonate with debates over the troubling tendency of powerful democracies to curtail civil liberties and pursue imperial ambitions.
Download or read book Reimagining the Transatlantic 1780 1890 written by Joselyn M. Almeida and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her thought-provoking study of Britain's relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean during the Romantic and Victorian periods, Joselyn M. Almeida makes a compelling case for extending the critical boundaries of current transatlantic and circumatlantic scholarship. She proposes the pan-Atlantic as a critical model that encompasses Britain's relationship to the non-Anglophone Americas given their shared history of conquest and the slave trade, and underscores the importance of writings by Afro-British and Afro-Hispanophone authors in formulating Atlantic culture. In adopting the term pan-Atlantic, Almeida argues for the interrelationship of the discourses of discovery, conquest, enslavement, and liberation expressed in literary motifs such as the New World, Columbus, and Las Casas; the representation of Native Americans; the enslavement and liberation of Africans; and the emancipation of Spanish America. Her study draws on the works of William Robertson, Ottobah Cugoano, Francisco Clavijero, Francisco Miranda, José Blanco White, Richard Robert Madden, Juan Manzano, Charles Darwin, and W. H. Hudson, uncovering the shared cultural grammar of travel narratives, abolitionist poems, novels, and historiographies that crosses national and linguistic boundaries.
Download or read book Passions Politics and the Limits of Society written by Heikki Haara and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1st part of the volume engages with the theme of inclusion and exclusion in the history of ideas from different perspectives. The 2nd part of the volume discusses debates on natural law, human nature and political economy in early-modern Europe. Its contributions explore the sorts of political and moral visions that were relevant in post-Hobbesian moral philosophy and the development of economic thought.
Download or read book Borderlines in Borderlands written by J. C. A. Stagg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In examining how the United States gained control over the northern borderlands of Spanish America, this text reassesses the diplomacy of President James Madison. The author also describes how a myriad cast of local leaders, officials and other small players affected the borderlands diplomacy between the United States and Spain.
Download or read book A Cultural History of the British Empire written by John MacKenzie and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling history of British imperial culture, showing how it was adopted and subverted by colonial subjects around the world As the British Empire expanded across the globe, it exported more than troops and goods. In every colony, imperial delegates dispersed British cultural forms. Facilitated by the rapid growth of print, photography, film, and radio, imperialists imagined this new global culture would cement the unity of the empire. But this remarkably wide-ranging spread of ideas had unintended and surprising results. In this groundbreaking history, John M. MacKenzie examines the importance of culture in British imperialism. MacKenzie describes how colonized peoples were quick to observe British culture—and adapted elements to their own ends, subverting British expectations and eventually beating them at their own game. As indigenous communities integrated their own cultures with the British imports, the empire itself was increasingly undermined. From the extraordinary spread of cricket and horse racing to statues and ceremonies, MacKenzie presents an engaging imperial history—one with profound implications for global culture in the present day.
Download or read book Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire written by Daniel O'Neill and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edmund Burke, long considered modern conservatism’s founding father, is also widely believed to be an opponent of empire. However, Daniel O’Neill turns that latter belief on its head. This fresh and innovative book shows that Burke was a passionate supporter and staunch defender of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, whether in the New World, India, or Ireland. Moreover—and against a growing body of contemporary scholarship that rejects the very notion that Burke was an exemplar of conservatism—O’Neill demonstrates that Burke’s defense of empire was in fact ideologically consistent with his conservative opposition to the French Revolution. Burke’s logic of empire relied on two opposing but complementary theoretical strategies: Ornamentalism, which stressed cultural similarities between “civilized” societies, as he understood them, and Orientalism, which stressed the putative cultural differences distinguishing “savage” societies from their “civilized” counterparts. This incisive book also shows that Burke’s argument had lasting implications, as his development of these two justifications for empire prefigured later intellectual defenses of British imperialism.
Download or read book Translations Histories Enlightenments written by L. Kontler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian and minister William Robertson was a central Scottish Enlightenment figure whose influence reached well beyond the boundaries of the British Isles. In this reception study of Robertson's work, Laszlo Kontler shows how the reception of Robertson's major histories in Germany tests the limits of intellectual transfer through translation.
