An Ancien Régime Revisited: “Privatization” and Political Economy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

1993 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARIEL SALZMANN
2020 ◽  
pp. 15-23
Author(s):  
Ian Coller

This prologue offers a snapshot of what Islam and Muslims meant for the France of the late ancien régime and observes the shifts that were already emerging as 1789 approached. From the end of the fifteenth century until the last quarter of the eighteenth, Islam remained on the fringe of a French consciousness. Islam was principally understood by the ancien régime as a heresy, a distorted version of Christianity. With the global geopolitical shifts of the later eighteenth century, however, these matrices of religious understanding were fundamentally changed. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, France joined a loose alliance with the Ottoman Empire, fostering ongoing contacts in diplomacy, military training, and trade with a Muslim power. Beginning in the 1720s, philosophers began to investigate the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad in new ways that undermined older theological understandings. Trade and diplomacy produced travelers' accounts that shaped the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers. Radical philosophical ideas about Islam came together with diplomatic and commercial knowledge of Muslim societies to produce a sea change in conceptions about Muslims and Islam that would become entangled with the revolutionary transformation.


Author(s):  
Michiel Van Dam

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Austrian Netherlands were plagued by politicalturmoil and social upheaval, brought forth by a reaction against the reformatory movementset up by the Habsburg government. The contestation of Joseph II's reformist policywas performed in public, as the region was flooded with polemical pamphlets, ideologicaltreatises and many other types of popular writings during (but also before and after) theperiod of the Brabant Revolution (1787-1789). Pamphlets have stood at the centre ofattention for historiography on Belgian political culture at the end of the ancien régime,yet this wide employment of the source material has not led to a comparative overview ofthe way these writings have been used in historical research. This article will attempt tofill this gap, by first providing a methodological typology of several historiographicaluses of a particular pamphlet, the Manifeste du Peuple Brabançon, written at the end of1789, and signed by the leader of the conservative opposition, Hendrik Van der Noot.Secondly, I will attempt to show how eighteenth-century pamphleteers used a multitudeof discourses at their disposal, by briefly discussing another set of (pre-revolutionary)pamphlets. This has immediate consequences for the current understanding of eighteenth-centuryBrabant political culture, which, so I argue, should not be considered discursivelymonolithic (containing one political language) but pluralist (containing multiple politicallanguages).


2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 571-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seven Ağir

Ottoman reformers' re-organization of the grain trade during the second half of the eighteenth century had two components—the creation of a centralized institution to supervise transactions and the replacement of the fixed price system with a more flexible one. These changes were not only a response to strains on the old system of provisioning, driven by new geopolitical conditions, but also a consequence of an increased willingness among the Ottoman elite to emulate the economic policies of successful rival states. Thus, the centralized bureaucracy and political economy of the Ottoman Empire at the time had remarkable parallels with those in such European states as France and Spain.


2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 544-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Powell McNutt

History demonstrates that the calendar is a tool of far more significance than simply a means to organize units of time. For Roman high priests prior to the reign of Julius Caesar, the calendar was a tool of power, symbolizing political supremacy over society through the manipulation of time at will. Under Pope Gregory XIII, the calendar was a symbol of papal responsibility to ensure the proper worship of the Catholic Church. In the case of European Protestants, the Julian calendar was a symbol of religious identity and protest against Catholic domination. Likewise, within revolutionary France, the Calendrier Républicain symbolized the rejection of the Ancien Régime and Catholicism. These few examples are an indication that throughout history in various times and places calendars have proven to represent more to humanity than mere time reckoning methods. Consequently, one may approach the study of the calendar as a means to grasp cultural and religious identity within specific regional contexts.


1987 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 267-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. McMillan

We are all familiar with the idea that the Church is in the world but not of it, and that too great a preoccupation with earthly things may compromise the Church’s other-worldly objectives. One thinks of the extravagance of a Renaissance pope such as Leo X, reputed to have said, ‘Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us’: or of an ancien régime prelate like the Archbishop of Mainz, who arrived for the coronation of the Emperor Joseph II with a retinue of fourteen sumptuous carriages: or, in our own time, the Vatican’s reported links with some of the shadier elements in the world of international finance. Yet, it is equally obvious that lack of adequate material resources can act as a serious impediment to the Church’s mission to go forth and teach all nations. Excessive poverty, like excessive wealth, brings its own problems. As the adage has it, not money itself but the desire for money is the root of all evil. Excessive poverty and the desire for money are the themes which I wish to pursue in this paper, in the context of the Scottish Catholic Mission in the eighteenth century, and more specifically as they relate to the so-called Jansenist quarrels which divided the Mission in the 1730s and 1740s.


1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 365-384
Author(s):  
Santo L. Aricò

In 1770, Antoine-Louis Séguier, the avocat général (king's advocate) of the Parlement of Paris, defended Jean-Baptiste Dubarle, a Parisian wine merchant, against charges of theft, seduction, kidnapping, and adultery initiated by a carpenter, Eustache Chefdeville. For all of the offenses, Chefdeville demanded monetary reparation.The case, summarized in a mémoire, connects the history of family law in France under the ancien régime to the skillful use of lawyerly forensics. But it also relates to literary portrayals of social scapegraces who betray the esteemed values of friendship and gratitude: in fact, this member of Paris's menu peuple emerges from the pages of the case abstract as a dissembling traitor. Séguier's legal brief, viewed as a work of fiction, projects Chefdeville as an ungrateful betrayer who feigns comradery. In Séguier's telling, this disfigured pariah, albeit socially inferior, takes his place next to the deceptive worldlings described in many eighteenth-century novels. Like them, he violates the sacred laws of sincerity, turning himself into a moral pervert. Séguier's mémoire is rich precisely because it demonstrates how a skilled lawyer attempting to win his case adopts the form of a story characterized by all the literary qualities of the day—love, friendship, avarice, and betrayal. It illustrates a classic legal approach and also reads like a novel from beginning to end.


1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 781-803 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Bergin

In the eighteenth century Louis XV's minister, Cardinal Dubois, defended himself against papal criticism of his appetite for church benefices by ordering that a list of benefices held by his seventeenth-century counterparts be prepared and sent to Rome. It was his way of proving that he was much less voracious than they had been.His defence serves to remind the historian of the extent to which the ancien régime church was dominated by powerful families and ministers, who enriched themselves considerably by amassing wealthy benefices. However, none of these cardinal-ministers, from Richelieu to Dubois, succeeded in founding ecclesiastical dynasties capable of preserving intact after their death the ecclesiastical possessions they had acquired; dynasties of this type had practically vanished by the mid-seventeenth century, having fallen foul of both the crown and of church reformers. While drawing enormous incomes from their benefices, Richelieu, Mazarin and Dubois accepted that their benefices, like their other offices, should be at the king's disposal after their death. This had not always been the case. Had Dubois’ historical curiosity been more disinterested, he would have discovered that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ecclesiastical dynasties of varying importance and staying-power had flourished within the French church, characterized by their ability to acquire and transmit large numbers of wealthy and prestigious benefices to family members over several generations. The minimum require ment for success was the breeding of younger sons and daughters prepared to ‘enter the church’ in order to perpetuate dynastic control of benefices.


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