Analysis and the hierarchy of nature in eighteenth-century chemistry

2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN SIMON
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chemical System ◽  
Plant Analysis ◽  
Mathematical Concepts ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Elementary Analysis ◽  
Vegetable Kingdom ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Elementary Chemical

What was the impact of Lavoisier's new elementary chemical analysis on the conception and practice of chemistry in the vegetable kingdom at the end of the eighteenth century? I examine how this elementary analysis relates both to more traditional plant analysis and to philosophical and mathematical concepts of analysis current in the Enlightenment. Thus I explore the relationship between algebra, Condillac's philosophy and Lavoisier's chemical system, as well as comparing Lavoisier's analytical approach to those of his predecessors, such as Baumé and Bucquet. With reference to the aims of vegetable analysis, I show how the dominance of elementary analysis devalued a tradition that sought to isolate immediate principles (plant extracts), marginalizing the chemical practices of many doctors and pharmacists in the context of the new chemistry in France.

Puritan Radicalism and the Enlightenment

1960 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 424-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
George L. Mosse
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Religious Truth ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment presents a subtle and difficult problem. No historian has as yet fully answered the important question of how the world view of the eighteenth century is related to that of traditional Christianity. It is certain, however, that the deism of that century rejected traditional Christianity as superstitious and denied Christianity a monopoly upon religious truth. The many formal parallels which can be drawn between Enlightenment and Christianity cannot obscure this fact. From the point of view of historical Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, the faith of the Enlightenment was blasphemy. It did away with a personal God, it admitted no supernatural above the natural, it denied the relevance of Christ's redemptive task in this world. This essay attempts to discover whether traditional Christian thought itself did not make a contribution to the Enlightenment.

‘The Real Value of the Lands’: The Nawabs, the British and the Land Tax in Eighteenth-Century Bengal

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. R. TRAVERS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Revenue Collection ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Real Value ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Ever since the late eighteenth century, no subject has been more prominent in histories of ‘the transition to colonialism’ in south Asia, than the issue of taxation. In particular, the complex system of agrarian taxation that was developed under the Mughal empire, and further elaborated by various post-Mughal regimes, has often been seen as the defining institution of both the pre-colonial and colonial states. What the British called ‘land revenues’, which included taxes on land proper (mal) and taxes on trade and markets (sair), were the main source of income for both Indian and British rulers. Assessments of the impact of colonial rule have often depended on supposed changes in the tax regime. Since the nineteenth century historians have tended to focus their attention on the relationship between the land tax and structures of agrarian property. They have generally argued that British rule both substantially increased the tax burden, and modified structures of agrarian tenure by splicing together rights of revenue collection and private property in land. But they have focused much more on early colonial policies with regard to private landed property, and less on the issue of the actual tax assessment. This paper takes up the issue of the land tax demand (known as jama in the terminology of Mughal and post-Mughal administration) tracing British debates about tax assessments through the first three decades of colonial rule in Bengal.

scholarly journals The Grain Market between the Reigns of Alexey Mikhailovich and Catherine the Great: Was there a ‘Price Revolution’?

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Mustafin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Grain Market ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Regions Of Russia ◽  
Grain Prices

The author of this article attempts to reveal and systematise archival data on grain prices in Russia between the 1650s and 1700s and analyse their dynamics by comparing them with data for the eighteenth century. The study is based on a wide range of archival sources from the funds of the RSAAA (RGADA), CSA of Moscow (TsGA of Moscow), DM NLR (OR RNB), and SFI CANNR (GKU TsANO). The data from these sources make it possible to construct time series describing rye and oat price dynamics in the northern and central non-black earth regions of Russia. The author substantiates the homogeneity and reliability of the data received and determines the real prices. The resulting numbers make the author doubt the “price revolution” in eighteenth-century Russia. Throughout the eighteenth century, the average real prices remained below the level of the 1660s and 1670s. Only in the 1790s did prices briefly exceed this level. Overall, the Russian grain market was characterised by long-term price fluctuations. The author aims to explain this dynamic by analysing supply and demand in the grain market. More particularly, for the first time in the historiography, the author examines the connection between Russian grain prices and yield in the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is established that in most cases, the relationship between these indicators was direct: as grain yield increased, prices did too. The article explains this seeming paradox. The data published by the author help not only to estimate the impact of various factors on grain prices during the period in question, but also solve practical tasks regarding various price indicators in grain equivalents.

scholarly journals POLICING PEDDLERS: THE PROSECUTION OF ILLEGAL STREET TRADE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DUTCH TOWNS

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIELLE VAN DEN HEUVEL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Local Power ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Street Vendors ◽  
Street Vending ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Source Materials

AbstractStreet vending was a common feature in many towns in early modern Europe. However, peddlers and hawkers often operated outside the official framework, lacking permission from governments and guilds. The impact of their informal status has hitherto not featured very extensively in historical studies. This article assesses the impact of policing of street vendors by looking at familiar source materials in a new way. Rather than solely focusing on those people who were ultimately punished, this article investigates the full process of policing and prosecution of street traders in eighteenth-century Dutch towns. It exposes that apart from those receiving a formal punishment, many more traders could suffer from policing activities, and that particular groups of street vendors were more vulnerable than others due to the specific dynamics of local power relations. As such, this article provides new insights into policing and social control, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the relationship between the formal and informal economy in pre-industrial Europe.

Religious Themes in Contemporary Art

2016 ◽  
pp. 188-218
Author(s):  
Codrina Laura Ionita
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between art and religion, evident throughout the entire history of art, can be deciphered at two levels – that of the essence of art, and that of the actual theme the artist approaches. The mystical view on the essence of art, encountered from Orphic and Pythagorean thinkers to Heidegger and Gadamer, believes that art is a divine gift and the artist – a messenger of heavenly thoughts. But the issue of religious themes' presence in art arises especially since modern times, after the eighteenth century, when religion starts to be constantly and vehemently attacked (from the Enlightenment and the French or the Bolshevik Revolution to the “political correctness” nowadays). Art is no longer just the material transposition of a religious content; instead, religion itself becomes a theme in art, which allows artists to relate to it in different ways – from veneration to disapproval and blasphemy. However, there have always been artists to see art in its genuine meaning, in close connection with the religious sentiment. An case in point is the work of Bill Viola. In Romanian art, a good example is the art group Prolog, but also individual artists like Onisim Colta or Marin Gherasim, who understand art in its true spiritual sense of openness to the absolute.

Introduction: Enlightenment and Empire

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Allan I. Macinnes ◽  
Jean-François Dunyach
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
North America ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Impact

The Enlightenment is here located in the global transmission of goods, people and ideas. The Scottish participation in Empires is explored through four distinctive themes. The first scrutinises how Whig and Jacobite perspectives on Enlightenment affected Scottish engagement with the British and other Empires. The second relates to the impact of Enlightenment thinking on the reputed decline of Spanish Empire on Scottish commercial access to Latin America. The third deals with enlightened critiques of Empire that were not necessarily sustained by observation and practical experience. The fourth explores through case studies the application of Enlightenment in North America and India. Most of the contributions were primarily given as papers to the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society Conference held in Paris Sorbonne in July 2013 with the Adam Smith Society and the Centre Roland Mousnier (Sorbonne) on ‘Scotland, Europe and Empire in the Age of Adam Smith and Beyond’. This volume is published with the financial support of the Centre Roland Mousnier, Sorbonne University.

Modalities of Assimilation: Subcultural Currents in Felix Mendelssohn's Lieder Ohne Worte

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Dan Deutsch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Historical Changes ◽  
The Real ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
German Jewry ◽  
The Impact

In this article I examine the impact on Felix Mendelssohn's music, as reflected in his Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words), of his affiliation with a German-Jewish subculture. To better understand the interrelationship between musical formations and sociocultural realities, I associate the real and imaginary tensions between the German, the Jewish, and the German-Jewish with stylistic ambiguities in Mendelssohn's piano songs, which often destabilize the lyrical simplicity projected by the lieder framework through formal complexities that exceed the narrow scope of the piano miniature. I establish the connections between Mendelssohn's music and sociocultural disposition by identifying a correlation between his so-called stylistic ‘conservatism’ and the anachronistic devotion of German Jewry to the universal ideals of the Enlightenment during the rise of German nationalism. Against this background, I primarily reveal the generic heterogeneity of the Lieder ohne Worte, which feature ‘progressive’ stylistic frameworks associated with the lied traditions yet concurrently point toward the formal ideals of eighteenth-century classicism. And following this, I position the stylistic duality of Mendelssohn's piano songs within a broader context through Heinrich Heine's essay The Romantic School, which sheds crucial light on the negotiation of Jewishness within German culture as it is reflected in aesthetic movements, historical changes, and political climates.

A Contested Inheritance: The Family and the Law from the Enlightenment to the French Revolution

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-87
Author(s):  
Hannah Callaway
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Family Law ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Family ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines a particularly interesting inheritance case from late-eighteenth-century France to study the intersection of legal practices and Enlightenment ideas at the end of the Old Regime. The case, involving dispute around the estate of a deceased tax farmer, addresses family relations broadly within the specific context of inheritance and spousal assets. The five briefs produced on appeal to the Parlement of Paris show particular engagement with Enlightenment themes of reason, nature, and sentiment. The family was a locus of particular interest in eighteenth-century France because of its implications for social relations and its connection, through inheritance, to royal sovereignty. However, family law has been primarily studied from the perspective of practices, whereas the present article focuses on ideals. The article argues that the courtroom was an important site where the diverse implications of Enlightenment thought on family law were worked out. The argument that family law was a site for integrating ideals into practices has implications for how we think about the relationship between law and social change, as well as, in particular, the relationship between Enlightenment and Revolution.

The Jesuits and the Enlightenment

2018 ◽  
pp. 854-890
Author(s):  
Joan-Pau Rubiés
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Accommodation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

How we think of the relationship between the Jesuits and the Enlightenment largely depends on how we conceptualize the latter. This chapter addresses it as a series of debates conducted in the context of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, and a number of specific cultural practices that made that very Republic possible. The Jesuits were, therefore, participants in, rather than enemies of, the Enlightenment. Because they combined theological conservatism with cultural modernity, the Jesuits were feared and resented with particular vehemence. Placed between two different modernities, one characterized by global structures of communication and learning, as well as by the practices of cultural accommodation, the other by the attack on superstition and religious authority, the Jesuits helped create the conditions for the Enlightenment, making important but paradoxical contributions to some of its central debates. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the impact of missionary ethnographies concerning the “Gentile” pagan peoples of the world.

Samuel Clain and the Rumanian Enlightenment in Transylvania

Slavic Review ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 660-675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Hitchins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The West ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

In the second half of the eighteenth century the leavening effects of the Enlightenment began to be felt among the Rumanians of Transylvania. The Enlightenment in Transylvania—and in Eastern Europe generally —was a curious blend of natural law, rationalism, and optimism, drawn from the West, and nationalism, a response to local conditions. It is no coincidence that the first tangible signs of national awakening among the Rumanians manifested themselves at this time. In the thought of the Enlightenment they discovered new justification for their claims to equality with their Magyar, Saxon, and Szekler neighbors. For example, they applied the notion of “natural” civil equality between individuals to the relationship between whole peoples, and they accepted wholeheartedly the myth of the social contract as the foundation of society and as the guarantee of the rights of all those who composed it.

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