Unaccountable Subjects: Contracting Legal and Medical Authority in the Newgate Smallpox Experiment (1721)

2019 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 22-44
Author(s):  
Spencer J Weinreich
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Authority ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Experimental Trials ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

Abstract The first experimental trials of smallpox inoculation were conducted on a group of prisoners in London’s Newgate Prison in 1721. These inmates were long believed to have been facing execution, but archival material reveals that they had in fact received pardons conditional on penal transportation to the Americas. This article rereads the design, progress, and reception of the experiment, reorienting the narrative around the prisoners, their agency, and the legal mechanisms of transportation and pardon. In that light the experiment reflects the dynamics of eighteenth-century governance and punishment: a relatively weak state’s reliance on contractors and deputies (whether to transport convicts or to conduct experiments), on the tacit co-operation of those below, and on the rhetorical management of its actions. Forced to accord the Newgate prisoners a measure of autonomy, the physicians and their royal backers faced a constant struggle to manage their subjects’ participation and to control the experiment’s meaning amid fierce controversy that ranged far beyond inoculation. The Newgate cohort reveals a basic identity between the medical subject and the political subject, but also highlights the fragility of such scripts, regardless of the political, economic, and cultural apparatus brought to bear.

Humane Markets

2019 ◽  
pp. 293-315
Author(s):  
James R. Otteson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Institutions ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Economic

Markets are often criticized for being amoral, if not immoral. The core of the “political economy” that arose in the eighteenth century, however, envisioned the exchanges that take place in commercial society as neither amoral nor immoral but indeed deeply humane. The claim of the early political economists was that transactions in markets fulfilled two separate but related moral mandates: they lead to increasing prosperity, which addressed their primary “economic” concern of raising the estates of the poor; and they model proper relations among people, which addressed their primary “moral” concern of granting a respect to all, including the least among us. They attempted to capture a vision of human dignity within political-economic institutions that enabled people to improve their stations. Their arguments thus did not bracket out judgments of value: they integrated judgments of value into their foundations and built their political economy on that basis.

Jefferson and the Simple Story of Pastoral Economies

2020 ◽  
pp. 75-133
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Rural Setting ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
John Taylor ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter argues that resistance to Hamiltonian finance was both an economic and literary critique. The familiar opposition between Hamiltonian finance and Jeffersonian agrarianism has put the stress on the rural setting—an emphasis that has led scholars to talk about economic policy with the literary term, “pastoralism.” This chapter argues that the importance of the pastoral to Jeffersonian writers is not found in agrarianism, but on the formal structure of simplification that is essential to pastoral poetics. This same imperative toward simplicity is also located in the eighteenth-century economic science that was crucial to the Jeffersonians: French physiocracy. The chapter explains the importance of physiocracy and pastoralism to the political-economic writing of Thomas Jefferson, George Logan, and John Taylor of Caroline.

POLITICAL ECONOMY, THE STATE, AND REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-444
Author(s):  
ANDREW JAINCHILL
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily C. Nacol
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
For Profit

This chapter briefly discusses three insights into early modern British engagement with risk: the presence of a distinct conceptual refinement in late seventeenth-century sources; the tight relationship between risk and trust in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought and political economy; and the character of the political subject, which is worked out in the early modern engagement with risk. Beyond these three observations, the chapter also argues that early modern British engagement with risk offers two narratives—views of risk that persist in our own time and shape our orientation toward an unknown future. These include accounts of risk as a threat to security, as well as depictions of risk as an opportunity to be exploited for profit or gain.

On the border: Chiapas, between empire and republic

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Washbrook
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Surplus Labour ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Means ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Church ◽  
Over Time

This chapter analyzes the political, economic, and social relations in Chiapas during the colonial era in order to better understand the nature and impact of the modernizing reforms enacted by liberal regimes after independence. The first section presents an overview of the conquest of the region from 1528 to around 1550. The second section examines the institutions of state rule and how they changed over time, emphasizing the break between Habsburg and Bourbon rule after 1750. The third section analyzes the history and structure of the Indian community or república de indios and underscores its important political, economic, and ideological role in colonial society. The next two sections look at controlled markets in commerce and labour (repartimientos), which constituted important means by which surplus labour and produce were extracted from the Indian population. The next section considers the history of the Church in Chiapas, which like the Spanish Crown extracted taxes, fees, and labour from the communities. The Church also structured religious celebration and public ritual in the communities around the corporate institutions of the parish and cofradía, thereby contributing to the consolidation of both colonial rule and Indian ethnic identity and solidarity. Chiapas's hacienda sector, which is examined in the final section, was also dominated by the Church, although production was limited in the province before Bourbon policies fomented the expansion of commercial agriculture in the late eighteenth century.

From Persecution to Pragmatism: The Habsburg Roma in the Eighteenth Century

2006 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 99-120
Author(s):  
David M. Crowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
National Agenda ◽  
The People ◽  
National Movements ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Birth Death

In many ways, the habsburg roma, or Gypsies, are a “people without history.”1 Given their nomadic existence, they left little or no imprint on the political, economic, and cultural institutions of the various dominions through which they passed. Even such staples of social historians as birth, death, and census records, land and tax registers, court transcripts, and popular newspapers bear little witness to their presence and impact. Not surprisingly, successive regimes in Vienna and other centers of power had little interest in a people who dwelled permanently only on the lower rungs of society. The Roma also had no corporate or national agenda. Although some did participate on the edges of various nineteenth-century national movements, they did so only marginally and often as Hungarians, Romanians, or Slovaks, rather than as representatives of the Roma community. Much of what we know comes not from the people themselves, but from the observations of non-Roma or gadžé (singular, gadžo; plural, gadžé or gadjé), whose accounts were often riddled with the kinds of cultural overlays and stereotypes that have haunted the Roma for centuries.

Narrating Lives: A Mughal Empress, A French Nabob, A Nationalist Muslim Intellectual

1995 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 474-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara D. Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
The Political ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Political Figure

With some exaggeration, one could claim that these three biographies, despite their disparate subjects—a seventeenth-century aristocratic lady of the Mughal court, an eighteenth-century French adventurer, and a twentieth-century Muslim intellectual and political figure—all tell the same story. In each case, a figure is born (as it happens, outside the Indian subcontinent) in relatively humble circumstances and emerges as a singular figure in some combination of the political, economic, intellectual life of the day. Each account proceeds chronologically, with the life presented as an unfolding, linear story, the fruit of “developments” and “influences,” in which the protagonist independently takes action. These accounts fit, in short, the genre of biography or autobiography known to us Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Malcolm X, of rags to riches—and, typically, lessons to impart (Ohmann 1970). Each is an example of the canonical form of male biography and autobiography that emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SULTAN ABDUL HAMID II AND MIDHAT PASHA (NOVEMBER 1876-FEBRUARY 1877)‎‎

2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (08) ◽  
pp. 408-427
Author(s):  
Seenaa Jasim Mohammed Seenaa Jasim AL TAEE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Position ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Relationship

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire witnessed ‎attempts to reform the political, economic, military, and social systems ‎according to the European style. Reforms emerged clearly in the ‎nineteenth century, resulting in a conflict between opponents and ‎supporters of reform. Among the manifestations of that dispute was ‎between Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who opposes reform, and Midhat Pasha, ‎who supports reforms. The research was divided into an introduction, a ‎conclusion, and three axes. The first axis dealt with the starting of the ‎development of views between Sultan Abdul Hamid II and Midhat Pasha. ‎As for the second one, it was the role of Midhat Pasha during the reign of ‎Sultan Abdul Hamid II. While the third axis discussed the political ‎position of Midhat Pasha after he was appointed as the (Grand Vizier). ‎The research came out with a set of important conclusions‎‎‎‎. Keywords: The Ottoman Empire, the politician, Medhat Pasha, Sultan Abdul Hamid.

scholarly journals Francesca Bregoli, Mediterranean Enlightenment. Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014)

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Tani
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Political ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Middle Ages

Tuscany has a long history of Semitic presence within its territory. Phoenicians during the Etruscan times, Jews and Arabs as of the Middle Ages: they all have played a key-role in the political, economic and cultural history of Tuscany.

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