Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750-1830

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750-1830 PDF Author: Gabriel Paquette
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317142861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Efforts to ascertain the influence of enlightenment thought on state action, especially government reform, in the long eighteenth century have long provoked stimulating scholarly quarrels. Generations of historians have grappled with the elusive intersections of enlightenment and absolutism, of political ideas and government policy. In order to complement, expand and rejuvenate the debate which has so far concentrated largely on Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, this volume brings together historians of Southern Europe (broadly defined) and its ultramarine empires. Each chapter has been explicitly commissioned to engage with a common set of historiographical issues in order to reappraise specific aspects of 'enlightened absolutism' and 'enlightened reform' as paradigms for the study of Southern Europe and its Atlantic empires. In so doing it engages creatively with pressing issues in the current historical literature and suggests new directions for future research. No single historian, working alone, could write a history that did justice to the complex issues involved in studying the connection between enlightenment ideas and policy-making in Spanish America, Brazil, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. For this reason, this well-conceived, balanced volume, drawing on the expertise of a small, carefully-chosen cohort, offers an exciting investigation of this historical debate.

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750-1830

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750-1830 PDF Author: Gabriel Paquette
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317142861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book Here

Book Description
Efforts to ascertain the influence of enlightenment thought on state action, especially government reform, in the long eighteenth century have long provoked stimulating scholarly quarrels. Generations of historians have grappled with the elusive intersections of enlightenment and absolutism, of political ideas and government policy. In order to complement, expand and rejuvenate the debate which has so far concentrated largely on Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, this volume brings together historians of Southern Europe (broadly defined) and its ultramarine empires. Each chapter has been explicitly commissioned to engage with a common set of historiographical issues in order to reappraise specific aspects of 'enlightened absolutism' and 'enlightened reform' as paradigms for the study of Southern Europe and its Atlantic empires. In so doing it engages creatively with pressing issues in the current historical literature and suggests new directions for future research. No single historian, working alone, could write a history that did justice to the complex issues involved in studying the connection between enlightenment ideas and policy-making in Spanish America, Brazil, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. For this reason, this well-conceived, balanced volume, drawing on the expertise of a small, carefully-chosen cohort, offers an exciting investigation of this historical debate.

Languages of Reform in the Eighteenth Century

Languages of Reform in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Susan Richter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000740528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Societies perceive "Reform" or "Reforms" as substantial changes and significant breaks which must be well-justified. The Enlightenment brought forth the idea that the future was uncertain and could be shaped by human beings. This gave the concept of reform a new character and new fields of application. Those who sought support for their plans and actions needed to reflect, develop new arguments, and offer new reasons to address an anonymous public. This book aims to compile these changes under the heuristic term of "languages of reform." It analyzes the structures of communication regarding reforms in the 18th century through a wide variety of topics.

The Enlightenment in Iberia and Ibero-America

The Enlightenment in Iberia and Ibero-America PDF Author: Brian Hamnett
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786830477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
This book discusses responses to the challenges faced by two different Iberian imperial systems in their struggle to sustain territorial integrity and economic interests in the face of international competition. During a so-called period of ‘Enlightened Despotism’, absolutist governments in Spain and Portugal sought to harness Enlightenment ideas to their policies of reform. The Iberian Enlightenment, however, did not rely exclusively on government sponsorship – it had existing foundations in sixteenth-century Spanish humanism and subsequent attempts at reform, and educated individuals in major cities frequently operated independently of government. The Enlightenment contributed greatly to the availability of potential political solutions to the urgent matter of political status, in the attempt to transform absolutist governments into constitutional systems and drawing in the process on the structures of medieval foundations, contemporary revolutions or less radical constitutional monarchies, or a combination of sources more closely aligned with Ibero-American realities.

Re-Imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780-1870

Re-Imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780-1870 PDF Author: Eduardo Posada-Carbo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197631576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
"This book explores the ways in which people in Latin America and the Caribbean joined with others in Europe and the United States to re-imagine the ancient term "democracy", so as to give it relevance and power in the modern world. In all these regions, that process largely followed the French Revolution; in Latin America it more especially followed independence movements of the 1810s and 20s. The book looks at how a variety of political actors and commentators used the term to characterize or argue about modern conditions through the ensuing half-century; by 1870, it was firmly established in mainstream political lexicons throughout the region. Following introductory scene-setting and overview chapters, specialists contribute wide-ranging accounts of aspects of the context in which the word was "re-imagined"; six final chapters explore differences in its fortune from place to place"--

Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba

Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba PDF Author: Paul Niell
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292766610
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island’s first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana’s central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana’s founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order. Paul Niell analyzes how Cubans produced heritage at the site of the symbolic ceiba tree by endowing the collective urban space of the plaza with a cultural authority that used the past to validate various place identities in the present. Niell’s close examination of the extant forms of the 1754 and 1828 civic monuments, which include academic history paintings, neoclassical architecture, and idealized sculpture in tandem with period documents and printed texts, reveals a “dissonance of heritage”—in other words, a lack of agreement as to the works’ significance and use. He considers the implications of this dissonance with respect to a wide array of interests in late colonial Havana, showing how heritage as a dominant cultural discourse was used to manage and even disinherit certain sectors of the colonial population.

Who Should Rule?

Who Should Rule? PDF Author: Mónica Ricketts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190494905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Who Should Rule? traces the ambitious imperial reform that empowered new and competing political actors in an era of intense imperial competition, war, and the breakdown of the Spanish empire. Mónica Ricketts examines the rise of men of letters and military officers in two central areas of the Spanish world: the viceroyalty of Peru and Spain. This was a disruptive, dynamic, and long process of common imperial origins. In 1700, two dynastic lines, the Spanish Habsburgs and the French Bourbons, disputed the succession to the Spanish throne. After more than a decade of war, the latter prevailed. Suspicious of the old Spanish court circles, the new Bourbon Crown sought meritorious subjects for its ministries, men of letters and military officers of good training among the provincial elites. Writers and lawyers were to produce new legislation to radically transform the Spanish world. They would reform the educational system and propagate useful knowledge. Military officers would defend the monarchy in this new era of imperial competition. Additionally, they would govern. From the start, the rise of these political actors in the Spanish world was an uneven process. Military officers became a new and somewhat solid corps. In contrast, the rise of men of letters confronted constant opposition. Rooted elites in both Spain and Peru resisted any attempts at curtailing their power and prerogatives and undermined the reform of education and traditions. As a consequence, men of letters found limited spaces in which to exercise their new authority, but they aimed for more. A succession of wars and insurgencies in America fueled the struggles for power between these two groups, paving the way for decades of unrest. Emphasizing the continuities and connections between the Spanish worlds on both sides of the Atlantic, this work offers new perspectives on the breakdown of the empire, the rise of modern politics in Spanish America, and the transition to Peruvian independence.

Feeding the People

Feeding the People PDF Author: Rebecca Earle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108645305
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop, yet they were unknown to most of humanity before 1500. Feeding the People traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes to everywhere. The potato's global history reveals the ways in which our ideas about eating are entangled with the emergence of capitalism and its celebration of the free market. It also reminds us that ordinary people make history in ways that continue to shape our lives. Feeding the People tells the story of how eating became part of statecraft, and provides a new account of the global spread of one of the world's most successful foods.

Domesticating Empire

Domesticating Empire PDF Author: Karen Stolley
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826502873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Why has the work of writers in eighteenth-century Latin America been forgotten? During the eighteenth century, enlightened thinkers in Spanish territories in the Americas engaged in lively exchanges with their counterparts in Europe and Anglo-America about a wide range of topics of mutual interest, responding in the context of increasing racial and economic diversification. Yet despite recent efforts to broaden our understanding of the global Enlightenment, the Ibero-American eighteenth century has often been overlooked. Through the work of five authors--Jose de Oviedo y Banos, Juan Ignacio Molina, Felix de Azara, Catalina de Jesus Herrera, and Jose Martin Felix de Arrate--Domesticating Empire explores the Ibero-American Enlightenment as a project that reflects both key Enlightenment concerns and the particular preoccupations of Bourbon Spain and its territories in the Americas. At a crucial moment in Spain's imperial trajectory, these authors domesticate topics central to empire--conquest, Indians, nature, God, and gold--by making them familiar and utilitarian. As a result, their works later proved resistant to overarching schemes of Latin American literary history and have been largely forgotten. Nevertheless, eighteenth-century Ibero-American writing complicates narratives about both the Enlightenment and Latin American cultural identity.

Architecture, Death and Nationhood

Architecture, Death and Nationhood PDF Author: Hannah Malone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131708988X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
In the nineteenth century, new cemeteries were built in many Italian cities that were unique in scale and grandeur, and which became destinations on the Grand Tour. From the Middle Ages, the dead had been buried in churches and urban graveyards but, in the 1740s, a radical reform across Europe prohibited burial inside cities and led to the creation of suburban burial grounds. Italy’s nineteenth-century cemeteries were distinctive as monumental or architectural structures, rather than landscaped gardens. They represented a new building type that emerged in response to momentous changes in Italian politics, tied to the fight for independence and the creation of the nation-state. As the first survey of Italy’s monumental cemeteries, the book explores the relationship between architecture and politics, or how architecture is formed by political forces. As cities of the dead, cemeteries mirrored the spaces of the living. Against the backdrop of Italy’s unification, they conveyed the power of the new nation, efforts to construct an Italian identity, and conflicts between Church and state. Monumental cemeteries helped to foster the narratives and mentalities that shaped Italy as a new nation.

Rebellious Prussians

Rebellious Prussians PDF Author: Florian Schui
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191651044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Prussian discipline is legendary. Central to debates about modern German history is the view that an oppressive Prussian state cast a shadow on the development of civil society. In particular, historians have seen the absence of a revolution in the eighteenth century as a symptom of a delayed and incomplete emancipation of the Prussian bourgeoisie. Prussia's urban dwellers have often been portrayed as poor relations of the self-reliant and assertive bourgeois of Western Europe and the Atlantic world. Economically backward and politically oppressed, they were allegedly in no position to challenge the iron grip of the state and question the authority of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Drawing from extensive and original research, Florian Schui challenges the accepted view and argues that Prussians in the eighteenth century were much more willing to challenge the state than has been recognised. Schui explores several instances where urban Prussians successfully resisted government policies and forced Frederick the Great and his successors to give in to their demands. Rebellious Prussians thus sheds light on a little-known historical reality in which weak Hohenzollern monarchs - and a still weaker Prussian bureaucracy - were confronted with prosperous, fearless, argumentative, and occasionally violent Prussian burghers. Such conflicts between state and citizens were by no means unique to Prussia. Rather the events in Prussia were, on many levels, connected to similar contemporary developments in other parts of Europe and North America. Florian Schui systematically explores these links and thus develops a new European and Atlantic perspective on Prussian history in the eighteenth century.