Finance Beyond the Bounds of the Fiscal-Military State: Debt, Speculation and the Renovation of Nineteenth-Century French Financial Capitalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyson Leuchter

Abstract Focusing on the Paris Stock Exchange in the early nineteenth century, this article examines the renovation of public debt and speculation following financial, political and military collapse. Though financial capitalism at the Exchange in the eighteenth century had been located mostly within the architecture of the fiscal-military state, the fallout of the Revolution and the defeat of the Napoleonic regime eliminated this option. Rather than military competition, financial capitalism at the Exchange in the nineteenth century was rebuilt by focusing inwards, by being linked to political values such as defined property rights, a particular vision of liberty and theories of representative government. Financial capitalism was still connected to empire, however; the reconstruction of financial capitalism at home helped to establish the conditions for exporting capital abroad, in the pursuit of informal empire. The article thus shows how financial capitalism came to be aligned with the political good in the post-revolutionary world.

Author(s):  
Andrew C. Thompson

Dissenters experienced considerable change during the eighteenth century. The political and cultural environment in which they lived was in flux. Before 1689, public declarations of Dissenting faith were risky. By the early nineteenth century, Dissenters were increasingly influential and secure. Several different processes helped to make these changes possible. One was the revival of ‘vital religion’, associated with a period of awakening. Awakening spread far and wide within European and American Protestantism but Dissenters were strongly affected by it. The growth of ideas of enlightenment encouraged both an emphasis on personal faith and the ability of the individual to make choices about faith for him/herself and also helped increase the resources able to express faith through burgeoning print culture.


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (26) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
João Paulo Peixoto Costa

<p>O espaço social imaginado para os índios na América portuguesa, entre meados do século XVIII e início do XIX, os colocava em uma ambiguidade. Mesmo estando em situação de equidade com os brancos enquanto vassalos régios, eram caracterizados como ainda sujeitos a uma espécie de “menoridade moral”. Entre a construção da imagem dessa população associada à barbárie e a ação política dessas comunidades em suas povoações, chama atenção a procura constante dos índios em identificar-se enquanto súditos do rei e merecedores dos direitos que lhes eram garantidos e que bem conheciam. Diante desses conflitos, o objetivo é contrastar a imagem de “entregues à natureza” construída pelos governadores com a cultura política dos índios vilados no Ceará, omitida dos registros do governo, apesar de sua presença latente.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>The social space imagined for the Indians in Portuguese America, between the mid-eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, put them in an ambiguity. Even though they are in a situation of equality with the white men known as vassals, were characterized as still subject to a kind of "moral minority". Between the construction of the image associated with this barbarism and the political action of these communities in their towns’ population, it points out the constant pursuit of the Indians in order to identify themselves as subjects of the king and deserving of rights that were guaranteed and that they knew well. Given these conflicts, the goal is to contrast the image of  “delivered to nature” which is built by the governors with the political culture of Indians in Ceará, that are omitted from the records of the government, despite its latent presence.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>:<strong> </strong>Indians. Political culture. Ceará.</p>


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rik Vosters ◽  
Gijsbert Rutten

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a distinct Southern Dutch linguistic identity emerged in the region now known as Flanders, and spelling features are at the heart of this developing linguistic autonomy. By analyzing eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century normative and metalinguistic comments about three highly salient spelling variables (the spelling of the long vowels a and u in closed syllables, the ending 〈-n〉 or 〈-ø〉 in masculine adnominals, and the orthographic representation of etymologically different e and o sounds), we will show how seemingly insignificant features increasingly came to be portrayed as representing an unbridgeable linguistic gap between the Northern and Southern Low Countries. At the time of the political reunion of both parts of the Dutch speaking territories (1815–1830), this perceived gap then gave rise to different voices rejecting or embracing these shibboleths of linguistic ‘Southernness’, indicating how spelling features came to represent conflicting identities.


1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-204
Author(s):  
Frank O'Malley

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cynthia Roman

Abstract Focusing on A smoking club (1793/7) by James Gillray, this essay presents satiric representations of smoking clubs in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British prints, arguing that they reflect and mediate contemporary understandings of tobacco as an intoxicant in British associational life. The breadth of potential cultural connotations – from political and social parody to light-hearted humour – is traced through the content and imagery of selected prints. These prints rely on the familiarity of contemporary audiences with political and social knowledge, as well as a visual iconography iconically realized in William Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation (1732).


2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 550-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Assef Ashraf

AbstractThis article uses gift-giving practices in early nineteenth-century Iran as a window onto statecraft, governance, and center-periphery relations in the early Qajar state (1785–1925). It first demonstrates that gifts have a long history in the administrative and political history of Iran, the Persianate world, and broader Eurasia, before highlighting specific features found in Iran. The article argues that the pīshkish, a tributary gift-giving ceremony, constituted a central role in the political culture and economy of Qajar Iran, and was part of the process of presenting Qajar rule as a continuation of previous Iranian royal dynasties. Nevertheless, pīshkish ceremonies also illustrated the challenges Qajar rulers faced in exerting power in the provinces and winning the loyalty of provincial elites. Qajar statesmen viewed gifts and bribes, at least at a discursive level, in different terms, with the former clearly understood as an acceptable practice. Gifts and honors, like the khil‘at, presented to society were part of Qajar rulers' strategy of presenting themselves as just and legitimate. Finally, the article considers the use of gifts to influence diplomacy and ease relations between Iranians and foreign envoys, as well as the ways in which an inadequate gift could cause offense.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


Author(s):  
Alice Soares Guimarães

This chapter examines transformations of state–society relations in eighteenth-century Portugal in relation to Enlightened political debates of the time. It also explores how these transformations shaped the relations between Portugal and Brazil in the nineteenth century, the debate about the political form of independent Brazil, and the intra-Brazilian struggles over this form before and after independence. More importantly, it challenges the notion that the Enlightenment was absent from the Portuguese Empire as a result of the rejection of modern ideas by conservative world views and projects. It argues that there was a Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment that was plural and eclectic, supporting both critiques and defences of the absolute power of the king, endorsing simultaneously a secularisation process, the promotion of reason and Roman Catholicism, and fostering not only revolutionary projects but also conservative state reforms.


Author(s):  
T. C. Smout

This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.


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