The Multiple Geographies of War Captivity

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-182
Author(s):  
Renaud Morieux
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
The State ◽  
Forced Migrants ◽  
Spatial Displacements ◽  
At Home

Chapter 3 proposes to define prisoners of war as forced migrants. Although the notions of circulation and imprisonment seem antithetical, this chapter posits that spatial displacements were at the heart of the experience of war imprisonment. It is often forgotten that prisoners of war, by definition, moved, and that this mobility was systemic. For anyone captured at sea, phases of detention on land alternated with internment on anchored or moving ships. The circulations of prisoners of war within, between, and across empires are all part of the same system. By comparing metropolitan, Atlantic, and Caribbean mobility, the shared features of the eighteenth-century state, at home and in the colonies, are highlighted. The prisoners’ strategies to play the system are, it is argued, a side-effect of the limitations of the reach of the state.

“To know this is the true essential business of a king”: The Prince of Wales and the Study of Public Finance, 1755–1760

1986 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Bullion
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Economy ◽  
The State ◽  
National Debt ◽  
Personal Favorite ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
At Home

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the growth of the national debt, the burden of the taxes necessary to support it, and the effect of this system of public finance on the politics, economy, and society of Britain, deeply concerned politicians in opposition. Their frequent expressions of concern were sufficiently persuasive to induce similar apprehensions on occasion in politicians at court. In 1753, when the national debt was a little over £74,000,000, earl Waldegrave, a personal favorite of George II, felt compelled to tell the House of Lords about a “consideration of very great importance, … the state of our national debt [and] the heavy taxes which are the consequences of this debt.” The situation required, he went on, “prudent measures of government, with that strict national economy which must be our only remedy.” Waldegrave did not go so far as to believe the nation was on the verge of collapse. As he pointed out, “a country and a government like ours has so many and so great resources, that we may bear a great deal and still be in a flourishing condition.” “Yet as long as this evil does subsist,” he warned the House, “we can never expect fully to exert our proper strength.” He concluded, “Till this burden is removed it will remain a check to our trade, will be still heavier on the landed interest, must lessen our credit and influence abroad, and will be a cause of discontent if not of disaffection at home.”

Prisoners of War: Does the Fight Continue After the Battle?

1969 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-786 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Walzer
Keyword(s):  
Home Country ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
The State ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
At Home

Just beyond the state there is a kind of limbo, a strange world this side of the hell of war, whose members are deprived of the relative security of political or social membership. Different sorts of people live there, mostly for indefinite periods of time, people who have been expelled from their state or otherwise deprived of legal rights, people whose state has been defeated in war and occupied or who have been separated somehow from its jurisdiction. Among the residents, two groups endure conditions paradigmatic for all the others: refugees, deprived of their rights by persecution; and prisoners of war, separated from their state by captivity. The two are very different, since refugees are stateless persons, radically dependent on their hosts and unable to look backward to any protecting authority, while prisoners remain citizens still and receive such protection as their states can provide. However distant and isolated they may be from their home country, their captivity is (hopefully) temporary; both captives and captors may one day be required to account for their behavior. Nevertheless, prisoners and refugees belong alike to the limbo world. They cannot expect effective help from any organized society; they do not know when, if ever, they will be “at home” again; they are compelled to reconstruct or redefine their obligations without reference, or without clearcut reference, to authoritative laws and commands.

scholarly journals The Prisoner of War and the Eighteenth-Century Prison

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Randall McGowen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
European Society ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
The State ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fresh Insight ◽  
Insight Into

Britain and France were at war with each other for over half of the long eighteenth century. This period of sustained conflict produced immense changes, in both countries, in the character of the state and the course of economic development. Yet one of the most obvious ways in which contemporaries would have encountered the war was in the presence of large numbers of prisoners of war held by their country. Early in the century there were thousands of such captives, and by its end they numbered in the tens of thousands. Renaud Morieux takes this neglected topic for the focus of his multifaceted study. These prisoners created challenges that were legal and diplomatic, as well as administrative and financial. The citizens of each country found themselves having to learn to live with captives of a nation with which they were at war. In a work that is both theoretically informed and exhaustively researched, Morieux offers fresh insight into the consequences of war for European society.

The Equivalent Societies of Edinburgh and London, the Formation of the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Nature of the Scottish Financial Revolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-114
Author(s):  
Andrew McDiarmid
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Financial Institution ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Developments ◽  
Complex Movement ◽  
At Home ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractThe historiography of the Financial Revolution in Scotland remains underdeveloped. This article addresses that gap by rounding out the rough sketch that currently represents our understanding of Scotland's Financial Revolution by focusing on the formation of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotland's first new financial institution in more than thirty years when it emerged in 1727. The case is made that the Scottish Financial Revolution was a complex movement, very often separated from the state and driven by the agency of Scotsmen at home and abroad, and that 1727 denoted a phase of the revolution in which financially innovative projects returned to the country after a period of absence. The article demonstrates how the progress of the Financial Revolution ebbed and flowed in the country, contingent upon political circumstances, from the nascent economic developments of the 1690s and on to the political upheaval of the early eighteenth century.

Slavery and Ransom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
New System

This chapter frames the arguments of the book, defines terms, and outlines the story that will follow. In the eighteenth century, the Ottoman state and its Russian rival, through conflict and diplomacy, worked out a new system of regional international law. Ransom was abolished; soldiers became prisoners of war; some slaves gained new paths to release, while others were left entirely unprotected. These rules delineated sovereignty, redefined individuals’ relationships to states, and prioritized political identity over economic value. In the process, the Ottomans marked out a parallel, non-Western path toward elements of modern international law. This story has important implications, the Introduction argues, for our understanding of Ottoman history and the histories of both international law and slavery and abolition.

‘To Mount or Not to Mount?’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nandita Sahai
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The State ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Royal Courts

This chapter examines documentary culture in eighteenth-century Rajasthan through an exploration of the legal archive—the Sanad Parwana Bahis—of the kingdom of Jodhpur. More particularly, it studies the petitions that were written in the course of a series of protracted disputes during which the ceremonial and ritual claims made by low-caste Sunars were contested by upper castes. The increasing importance of the written record in the administration and courts both caused, and was an outcome of a nascent “literate mentality” that existed even amongst those social groups like the Sunars who were not traditionally associated with scribal work. What is particularly telling is the shift from oral testimonies to written evidence as verifiable and authentic, both in the royal courts and in lower assemblies like caste councils. The pervasive culture of record keeping, and the significance of writing both for the state and its subjects at this time allows us to interrogate any easy bifurcation between the modern and the premodern.

Rousseau, Bodin, and the Medieval Corporatist Origins of Popular Sovereignty

2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172098545
Author(s):  
Dan Edelstein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Dual Identity ◽  
Jean Bodin ◽  
Classic Argument

This essay reconsiders Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s debt to Jean Bodin, on the basis of Daniel Lee’s recent revision of Bodin as a theorist of popular sovereignty. It argues that Rousseau took a key feature of his own theory of democratic sovereignty from Bodin—namely, the dual identity of political members as both citizens and subjects of the state. It further makes the case that this dual identity originates in medieval corporatist law, which Bodin was summarizing. Finally, it demonstrates the lasting impact of corporatist law in eighteenth-century France, highlighting Rousseau’s direct borrowings from the corporatist language and logic of contemporary commercial societies. In this regard, the article revisits and updates Otto von Gierke’s classic argument about the origins of the state in corporatist thought.

Deconstructing female conventions

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria E. Rodríguez-Gil
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
At Home

Summary This paper examines Ann Fisher’s (1719–1778) most important and influential work, A New Grammar (1745?). In this grammar, the author did not follow the trend of making English grammar fit the Latin pattern, a common practice still in the eighteenth century. Instead, she wrote an English grammar based on the nature and observation of her mother tongue. Besides, she scattered throughout her grammar a wide set of teaching devices, the ‘examples of bad English’ being her most important contribution. Her innovations and her new approach to the description of English grammar were indeed welcomed by contemporary readers, since her grammar saw almost forty editions and reprints, it influenced other grammarians, for instance Thomas Spence (1750–1814), and it reached other markets, such as London. In order to understand more clearly the value of this grammar and of its author, this grammar has to be seen in the context of her life. For this reason, we will also discuss some details of her unconventional lifestyle: unconventional in the sense that she led her life in the public sphere, not happy with the prevailing idea that women should be educated for a life at home.

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