Public Order and Privilege: Eighteenth-Century French Roots of Environmental Regulation

2002 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Claude Reynard
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten

This chapter begins with a quote from the celebrated seventeenth-century Mexico City Poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, highlighting the hypocritical intersection between gender and sexuality in this era. The focus here is on the legal history of eighteenth-century middle class women who retained a degree of public honor as they took part in sex work inside their homes.The confused eighteenth-century reactions by church, state, and neighbors to sexually active women often derived from increased opportunities for permitted or at least tolerated socializing between the sexes. These new social spaces challenged official ideas of public order and permissible gender interaction.


Author(s):  
Douglas A. Irwin

This chapter provides a background on why free trade is considered to be a desirable policy. It explains whether the most frequently made criticisms of free trade, such as its adverse impact on workers and the environment, have merit. It discusses what is the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as how world trade rules erode a country's sovereignty and undermine its health and environmental regulation. The chapter also introduces basic economic principles and empirical evidence regarding international trade and trade policy. It mentions the perspective on free trade that was originally developed by David Hume and Adam Smith in eighteenth-century Scotland.


1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Storch ◽  
F. Engels

The implantation of a modern police in the industrial districts of Northern England resulted from a new consensus among the propertied classes that it was necessary to create a professional, bureaucratically organized lever of urban discipline and permanently introduce it into the heart of working-class communities. The coming of the new police represented a significant extension into hitherto geographically peripheral areas of both the moral and political authority of the state. This was to be accomplished by the creation of a powerful and quite modern device – a bureaucracy of official morality. By 1840 it came to be “an axiom in police that you guard St. James by watching St. Giles”. This was a novel attitude. Eighteenth-century governments and the upper classes in general were surely apprehensive of the movements of the lower orders, but did not consider it either useful or necessary to watch St Giles all the time. One could learn what one needed to know about what was on the collective mind of St Giles when it rioted; one might even use or manipulate its riots in useful ways as the reform movement of 1830–32 did with great success. Previous to the nineteenth century urban disorder was not necessarily perceived as subversive of the social order. “Provided that the ruler did his duty, the populace was prepared to defend him with enthusiasm. But if he did not, it rioted until he did. This mechanism was perfectly understood by both sides, and caused no political problems beyond a little occasional destruction of property […]. Since the riots were not directed against the social system, public order could remain surprisingly lax by modern standards.”


2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (03) ◽  
pp. 727-759
Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani

France regulated competition through the gradual development of jurisprudence rooted in Old Regime practices of speculation and hoarding. This article aims to understand the reasons for this institutional legacy in order to determine if and how these norms could be adapted to the new phenomena of industrial concentration as they appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century.I argue that French regulation of futures trades and speculation are aimed to stabilize and enhance markets and not to limit them, and that continuities in market and capitalism regulation were much more important than usually held.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Demaitre

Until the eighteenth century, authorities regularly responded to reports of leprosy by ordering a formal examination, resulting in a certified judgment on the health and future of the suspect. This chapter is part of an ongoing project involving the collation of 600 certificates, recorded between 1250 and 1807, and preserved in Western European archives, set in the wider context of urban regulations, institutional statutes, and royal or imperial edicts. Contrary to prevailing stereotypes, public responses to leprosy varied quantitatively, qualitatively, regionally, and chronologically. A wide range of dynamics beyond the issue of contagion, which monopolizes retrospective discussions of Hansen’s disease, is apparent. Public order was more often the paramount concern of examiners, while separation did not necessarily equate with exclusion.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vaughn Scribner

When investigated through the tavern space, the processes of social differentiation so often associated with more populated northern “urban crucibles” appear less geographically determined than previously supposed. Colonial elites throughout British North America attempted to impose order and control over society during the eighteenth century. Elites’ quest for social differentiation and public order thus went beyond place. Whether patricians’ efforts occurred in Williamsburg or New York, such endeavors centered around the colonies’ most popular, accessible, and numerous public space—the tavern. This article will use Chesapeake and Low Country taverns to demonstrate, through outwardly broad but nonetheless effective comparisons with taverns in the northern colonies, that colonists throughout the eastern seaboard experienced very similar processes of social differentiation despite living thousands of miles apart. The tavern places Chesapeake and Low Country urban centers on an equal footing with their northern counterparts in their contributions to elites’ attempts at order and control.


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