The classical model of contract: the product of a revolution in legal thought?

Legal Studies ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-532
Author(s):  
Warren Swain
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Classical Model ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legal Literature ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Proper Weight

Writing in the introduction to his new treatise on contract in 1826, Joseph Chitty observed that ‘Perhaps no branch of the jurisprudence of this country has of late years been more subject of judicial inquiry and decision than the Law of Contracts’. It is generally accepted that the so-called classical model of contract law, which remains influential into the present day, was created at this time. Ever since the subject first attracted sustained attention from legal historians in the 1970s, the driving forces of these developments have been contested. Some saw legal change as a product of economic and social factors. For others the reception of new ways of thinking and legal literature provided a more convincing explanation. What is not usually disputed is that there was a fundamental revolution in contract doctrine and literature in the nineteenth century. This assumption is open to challenge. It fails to give proper weight to the past. In fact these changes were deeply rooted in the eighteenth century and even earlier.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Quintin Colville ◽  
James Davey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Influences ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current State ◽  
Naval History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Many ◽  
Historical Profession

This introduction gives on overview of the sub-discipline of naval history since its emergence in the early eighteenth-century. It outlines the various social, cultural and political influences that have shaped the subject over the past three centuries, and discusses its relationship with the wider historical profession. The second half of the introduction sums up the current state of naval history, describing the many historiographies that now have a bearing on how the subject is conducted. Each contribution to the volume is introduced in this context, offering a precis of the chapters that follow.

Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Varwig
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Time History ◽  
Johann Sebastian Bach ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

Narratives of music and modernity have been prominent in musicological writings of the past decade, and the place of Johann Sebastian Bach within these narratives has formed the subject of stimulating debates. Recent studies by Karol Berger and John Butt have aimed to integrate Bach's Passion compositions into broadly conceived philosophical frameworks, in Berger's case focusing specifically on changing perceptions of time from a premodern sense of circular stasis to a modern linear idea of progress. This article proposes an alternative model of historical inquiry into these issues by presenting a detailed look at attitudes to time in early eighteenth-century Protestant Leipzig. My approach reveals a complex constellation of conflicting ideas and metaphors that encompass notions of time as both circular and linear and evince a particular concern for the question of how to fill the time of one's earthly existence productively. In this light, pieces like Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Georg Philipp Telemann's Brockes Passion can be understood to have offered a range of different temporal experiences, which depended on individual listening attitudes, performance decisions, and surrounding social conventions. I argue that only through paying close attention to these fluid and often incongruous discourses can we gain a sufficiently nuanced picture of how music may have reflected and shaped early eighteenth-century conceptions of time, history, and eternity.

Grotius’s Impact on the Scandinavian Theory of Contract Law

Grotiana ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-87
Author(s):  
Sören Koch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Legal Literature ◽  
The Will ◽  
Will Theory ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Negative Conclusion ◽  
Contractual Agreement

This article discusses to what extent the widely accepted hypotheses of Hugo Grotius’s crucial impact on the theory of contract law – also in Scandinavia – may be maintained or even positively confirmed. Although few direct references to the works of Grotius can be found in Scandinavian legal literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it would be premature to draw a negative conclusion. An impact of Grotius’s thoughts may rather be demonstrated by thoroughly analysing patterns of argumentation concerning specific contractual topics both in legal literature and case law. The article provides the reader with necessary information on the institutional and intellectual preconditions for the reception of Grotius in the Scandinavian legal orders before discussing the impact of the ‘will-theory’ on the requirements of a legally binding contractual agreement in the works of selected influential legal scholars and in case law in more detail. The analysis confirms that Grotius’s work contributed substantially to shaping the intellectual framework in which the first contract law doctrines in Scandinavia evolved.

The Rural ‘Middling Sort’ in Early Modern England, circa 1640–1740: Some Economic, Political and Socio-Cultural Characteristics

Rural History ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Kent
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Cultural Characteristics ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
English Society ◽  
The Subject

A middle class ‘did not begin to discover itself (except perhaps in London) until the last three decades of the [eighteenth] century’. So wrote E. P. Thompson in the 1970s in a now-famous analysis which divided English society into patricians and plebeians, and which, along with J. H. Hexter's ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’, largely eliminated ‘middle class’ from the vocabulary of early modern English historians. During the past decade, however, there has been renewed focus on the middle ranks in early modern England, now commonly labelled ‘the middling sort’, and such studies explicitly or implicitly call into question Thompson's polarized portrayal of English society. A number of earlier works analyzed the middling in the countryside, particularly in the period 1540 to 1640; but recent discussions focus largely on townsmen, and most are concerned with a later period, the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Even in a volume such asThe Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800, a collection of essays presenting recent scholarship on the subject, the rural middling sort receive very little attention (a fact acknowledged by one of the editors). This essay will draw upon detailed evidence from several parishes to consider characteristics of the middling in the countryside during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

scholarly journals XI. The pressure of explosion. —Experiments on solid and gaseous explosives. Parts I. and II

1906 ◽  
Vol 205 (387-401) ◽  
pp. 357-398 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Degree Of Approximation ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scientific Treatment ◽  
Life Work

The scientific treatment of this question may be said to date from the researches of Count Rumford who, at the end of the eighteenth century, devised the first apparatus by which explosive pressures could be estimated with some degree of approximation. During the past century the natural fascination of the subject, and the importance of the problems involved, attracted many of the ablest scientific minds. Several have made the study of explosions the object of their life work.

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 Reading the intentions of be going to. On the subjectification of future markers

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Budts ◽  
Peter Petré
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Functional Changes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Grammatical Subject ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Late Modern

Abstract This paper provides a detailed corpus-based account of the formal and functional changes that be going to underwent in Late Modern English. Despite be going to’s popularity, such studies remain rare for this period, in which the construction’s grammaticalization went through a second phase. Our analysis shows that the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a shift from intention to prediction, which originated in contexts with third person subjects. Reporting the intention of others generally involves a certain amount of guesswork, which eventually resulted in the creation of an additional, epistemic layer of prediction, reinforced by the gradual extension of be going to to express non-imminent future situations. It is argued that this shift involves an increase in subjectivity, as the emphasis gradually moved away from the grammatical subject to the speaker: what mattered was no longer the intentions of the subject, but the knowledge of the speaker about them. Attention is also drawn to parallel developments in other future markers, particularly will. Interestingly, and in spite of significant differences, each of these went through an intermediary stage that involved past tense uses with reference to a future in the past, which was already known to the speaker.

scholarly journals Persophilia

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-123
Author(s):  
Negar Davari
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
World History ◽  
National Level ◽  
Space Theory ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Shifts

Academic investigation of the mutual influences of the West and the Easthas been the subject of few studies during the past decades. In this category,Hamid Dabashi’s work on the mutual effects of the Persianate Orient and theWest is impressive. The book traces evidences of the West’s Persophiliathroughout world history from Biblical and ancient texts to contemporarytexts under the influence of the Romanticism, Transcendentalism, mysticism,fascism, and pan-Islamism approaches. It provides thoughtful commentaryon the roots of western Persophilia, its outcome for the West and the Persianaiteworld, and the overall picture of Persophilic knowledge productionand transfer.As such, Dabashi’s work contributes to the socio-historical hermeneuticsof Persian and western culture by mapping their inter-related texts. He considersPersophilia a sub-category of Orientalism, through which he challengescolonial-based Orientalism. By relying on Jürgen Habermas’ theory of bourgeoispublic space, Dabashi criticizes Raymond Schwab and Edward Said’sviews as introducing a one-directional influence of the West upon the East. Hiswork suggests that there is a cyclic relation of influences between them. Tofurther this point, Dabashi expands Habermas’ public space theory beyond“bourgeois” and shifts it from a limited national level into a transnational scenethat emphasizes the role of Persophilia in the circulation and production ofknowledge worldwide. The book deems the emergence of Persophilia duringthe eighteenth century and its continuation to the present time as an influential ...

White Legend Against Black: Nationalism and Enlightenment in a Spanish Context

1977 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Paul J. Hauben
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Las Casas ◽  
Bartolome De Las Casas ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Subject

The appearance of no less than four books in English marked 1971 as a banner year for Black Legend studies, especially for their colonial side. As in the past discussion emphasized the sixteenth century, dominated by the commanding and controversial Dominican, Bartolomé de Las Casas on one hand, and the grim Indian demographic catastrophe on the other. This was no less so during the Enlightenment's passionate debates on the subject. Modern research gives greater credence to mortality rates suggested by Las Casas, but centers on the dire effects of disease as the main agent causing mass death. As this essay will suggest, eighteenth century discussants were somewhat betwixt and between concerning the American experience and the Hispanic impact. Clearly much of the ongoing appeal of Las Casas' interpretation of the Indians' calamity, which stressed the conquerors' brutality, comes from its foreshadowing of modern agonies over race relations and western treatment of other colonialized peoples.

What is Ancient History?

Daedalus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-121
Author(s):  
Ian Morris ◽  
Walter Scheidel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Classical Model ◽  
World History ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Evolutionary Model ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Ancient Times

Every society has told stories about ancient times, but contemporary ancient history was the product of two main developments. The first was the invention of writing, which made scholarly study of the past possible, and the second was the explosion of knowledge about the world from the eighteenth century onward. Europeans responded to this explosion by inventing two main versions of antiquity: the first, an evolutionary model, was global and went back to the origins of humanity; and the second, a classical model, treated Greece and Rome as turning points in world history. These two views of antiquity have competed for two hundred and fifty years, but in the twenty-first century, the evidence and methods available to ancient historians are changing faster than at any other time since the debate began. We should therefore expect the balance between the two theories to shift dramatically. We close by considering some possible areas of engagement.

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