The rise and fall of the modern international system

1982 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. H. Hinsley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International System ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern System ◽  
History Of

In the history of relations between the worlcfs leading states since the end of the eighteenth century certain features stand out prominently. One is that infrequent wars have alternated with long periods of peace. From the 1760s to the 1790s these states were at peace; from the 1790s to 1815 they were at war; from 1815 to 1854, peace; 1871 to 1914, peace; 1914 to 1918, war; 1918 to 1939, peace; 1939 to 1945, war; and since 1945 another 36 years of peace already. Another feature, no less pronounced, is that each of these infrequent wars has been more demanding and devastating for all participants, more nearly total, than that which preceded it. In these respects, as also in a third on which I shall enlarge later on, international conduct in the past 200 years has differed from international conduct in all earlier times, when states were more or less continuously engaged in wars that remained limited in scale – and so much so that the rise of the modern system may safely be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

WILLIAM GELL AND POMPEIANA (1817–19 AND 1832)

2015 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 245-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Interests ◽  
Additional Income ◽  
Archaeological Approach

This article offers an analysis of the preparation, publication and reception of the two separate versions of William Gell's Pompeiana, texts that exercised a formative influence over Victorian understanding of not just Roman Pompeii, but of domestic Roman life more broadly throughout the nineteenth century, and that highlight a transition from eighteenth-century antiquarianism to a more ‘archaeological’ approach to the past in the nineteenth century. Using unpublished correspondence that has been overlooked by other scholarship on Gell, it argues that the form and content of the volumes responded to both contemporary fascination with the history of domestic life and the need for an affordable volume on Pompeii. But the volumes also reflected many of Gell's more personal interests, developed in a career of travelling in Greece, Asia Minor and Spain, and were a product of his circumstances: they were conceived in order that Gell (and his coadjutor John Peter Gandy in the first edition) might earn much-needed additional income, and were a means through which Gell could consolidate his social position in Naples by establishing his authoritative expertise on Pompeii.

scholarly journals A brief history of metrology: past, present, and future

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Pierre Fanton
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
International System ◽  
Actual State ◽  
The Past ◽  
System Of Units ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

In this paper, we take the freedom to paraphrase Stephen Hawking's well-known formula and approach, for a reflection about metrology. In fact, metrology has a past, a present, and a future. The past is marked by a rich series of events, of which we shall highlight only those which resulted in major turns. The impact of the French Revolution is indisputably one of them. The present corresponds to a significant evolution, which is the entry of metrology into the world of quantum physics, with the relevant changes in the International System of units (SI). An apercu of the actual state of the art of metrological technology is given. The future is characterised by a persisting need for a still enhanced metrology, in terms of performance and domain covered. In this respect, soft metrology seems to constitute a promising field for research and development.

Criminal Justice in Medieval Perugia and Bologna

1983 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah R. Blanshei
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Approach ◽  
Crime And Criminal Justice ◽  
Power And Authority

During the past twenty years historical investigations of crime and criminal justice have increased considerably. This new subfield has been hailed enthusiastically by many of its practitioners: Douglas Hay considers it one that offers a key to ‘unlocking the meanings of eighteenth century social history.’ John Styles and John Brewer view the study of crime and law as a ‘point d'appui for a social history approach that embraces both the history of society and the issues of power and authority, an approach, in other words, that resolves the “crisis of social history.”’ Moreover, Marzio Romani describes this research as one that utilizes crime as a 'symptom,’ as a link between ‘conjuncture’ and ‘structure.’

Ideology Hunting: The Case of James Harrington

1959 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 662-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith N. Shklar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
History Of

It is well known that each age writes history anew to serve its own purposes and that the history of political ideas is no exception to this rule. The precise nature of these changes in perspective, however, bears investigation. For not only can their study help us to understand the past; it may also lead us to a better understanding of our own intellectual situation. In this quest the political theories of the 17th century and particularly of the English Civil War are especially rewarding. It was in those memorable years that all the major issues of modern political theory were first stated, and with the most perfect clarity. As we have come to reject the optimism of the eighteenth century, and the crude positivism of the nineteenth, we tend more and more to return to our origins in search of a new start. This involves a good deal of reinterpretation, as the intensity with which the writings of Hobbes and Locke, for instance, are being reexamined in England and America testify. These philosophical giants have, however, by the force of their ideas been able to limit the scope of interpretive license. A provocative minor writer, such as Harrington, may for this reason be more revealing. The present study is therefore not only an effort to explain more soundly Harrington's own ideas, but also to treat him as an illustration of the mutations that the art of interpreting political ideas has undergone, and, perhaps to make some suggestions about the problems of writing intellectual history in general.

scholarly journals La physiologie des Lumières

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 139-156
Author(s):  
François Duchesneau
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Muscular Contraction ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Using a method which emphasizes the importance of the explanatory systems of the past for the history of science, this article studies eighteenth-century theories of irritability and muscular contraction. The main focus is on Albrecht von Heller and the way his theories are analogous to Newtonian "principles."

Medea Overlived: The Future of Catastrophe

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-198
Author(s):  
Juliette Cherbuliez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Isabelle Stengers

The final chapter turns to the particular nature of a Medean tragedy—that is, the tragedy of what Isabelle Stengers has called the “challenge” of a mother who kills her children but does not perish and is therefore without issue or, paradoxically, finality. This idea of tragedy in the neoclassical age is taken up through this temporal lens, by considering primarily Racine’s last play Athalie (1690). Through the idea of “lastness,” the chapter considers how tragedy demands a peculiar reading of time, of history, of our place in time, and of our relationship to a temporality out of our control. It considers the changing concept of “catastrophe,” originally a theatrical term that originally meant the final steps of a tragedy’s resolution, but shifted, in the eighteenth century, to designate an unpredictable cataclysm. Both within its verse and in its reception Athalie is the drama of a shift in temporalities, from one in which we lived history as an unfolding of events in the past, present, and future; to one in which the future’s devastations are always a surprise.

History and Legitimacy: Aspects of the Use of the Past in Precolonial Dahomey

1988 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 431-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Direct Contact ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Major Power ◽  
The Past ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Subject

The kingdom of Dahomey (or Fon) was probably founded during the first half of the seventheenth century, but emerged clearly as a major power only in the early eighteenth century when its king Agaja (ca. 1716–40) conquered its southern neighbours Allada (1724) and Whydah (1727), thereby establishing direct contact with the European slave-traders at the coast. Dahomey then remained the dominant power in the area until it was itself conquered by the French in the 1892–94. The kingdom ceased to exist as a political entity when its last king was deposed by the French in 1900, but a degree of institutional continuity has been maintained through the performance of rituals at the royal palace (now a museum) in the capital city Abomey. The history of Dahomey from the 1720s onwards is relatively well documented from contemporary European sources, enjoying in particular the unique distinction of being made the subject already in the eighteenth century of a published book—Archibald Dalzel's History of Dahomy (1793). There is also a rich and coherent corpus of narrative traditions relating to the kingdom's history, best known in the classic recension published in 1911 by the French colonial official Le Herissé, which is in fact merely a translation (and in some measure an abridgement, omitting some detailed material) of the account given to him by a single Dahomian informant, Agbidinukun, the chef de canton of the cercle of Abomey under French colonial rule and a brother of the last independent king of Dahomey, Behanzin (1889–94).

scholarly journals Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

Philosophy ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 509-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Duschinsky
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Blank Slate

AbstractIt is widely believed that the philosophical concept of ‘tabula rasa’ originates with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and refers to a state in which a child is as formless as a blank slate. Given that both these beliefs are entirely false, this article will examine why they have endured from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the history of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and feminist scholarship it will be shown how the image of the tabula rasa has been used to signify an originary state of formlessness, against which discourses on the true nature of the human being can differentiate their position. The tabula rasa has operated less as a substantive position than as a whipping post. However, it will be noted that innovations in psychological theory over the past decade have begun to undermine such narratives by rendering unintelligible the idea of an ‘originary’ state of human nature.

The Kuala Muda District: History of the administrative centres of Kota Kuala Muda & Sungai Petani, 1905-1957

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadaraja K.
Keyword(s):  
Local History ◽  
Japanese Occupation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern System ◽  
History Of

This book on local history discusses some important events that shaped the history of the Kuala Muda District in the first 50 years since the introduction of a modern system of administration in Kedah in 1905 until Malayas independence in 1957.More specifically, it highlights the development of the two administrative centres of the district, namely Kota Kuala Muda and Sungai Petani.The study, first, shows the transformation of Kota Kuala Muda from a feudal territory to a modern administrative centre of the district in 1905 which saw the establishment of several public offices, including the appointment of government officers to run the affairs of the district.It then focuses on Sungai Petani and its emergence as the new administrative centre in 1915, in place of Kota Kuala Muda, leading to the construction of a new township including roads, railway, buildings and expansion of plantation agriculture.The study also deals with some aspects of the Japanese occupation and the Emergency and how these events affected the people in the district.In sum, this book depicts the trials, tribulations and triumphs that the Kuala Muda District had gone through in the past.

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