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This fourth volume of A Cultural History of Western Empires explores the intersections and transformations of empire in the late 17th and 18th centuries: an age of "Enlightenment" understood here both as a product of these new forces and as a matrix shaping their emergence and development. As innovative ideas transformed warfare, commerce and agriculture, the great "universal" empires confronted new capitalist forces that both splintered and reinforced imperial relations across the globe. Dutch, English and French trading companies backed by state power increasingly overtook the imperial ascendency of Spain and Portugal, while Ottoman and Russian territorial expansion slowed or halted. Commodities and capital circulated in new ways, along with people and ideas, yet that mobility was hardly a free exchange. The new forces found their first great expression in the global trade in human labour that transformed communities, environments and social relations in Europe, Africa and the Americas.Above all, A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Age of Enlightenment reveals the profound imprint left by the Atlantic slave trade on global conceptions of race, sexuality and power, and the burgeoning imperial rivalry, resentment and resistance that contributed to the explosion of revolutionary change at the end of the 18th century

A study of the role of Muslims in eighteenth century France. From the beginning, French revolutionaries imagined their transformation as a universal one that must include Muslims, Europe's most immediate neighbors. They believed in a world in which Muslims could and would be French citizens, but they disagreed violently about how to implement their visions of universalism and accommodate religious and social difference. Muslims, too, saw an opportunity, particularly as European powers turned against the new French Republic, leaving the Muslim polities of the Middle East and North Africa as France's only friends in the region. In this book, the author examines how Muslims came to participate in the political struggles of the revolution and how revolutionaries used Muslims in France and beyond as a test case for their ideals. In the book's final chapter, the author reveals how the French Revolution's fascination with the Muslim world paved the way to Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Egypt in 1798.

Many think of Muslims in Europe as a twentieth century phenomenon, but this book brings to life a lost community of Arabs who lived through war, revolution, and empire in early nineteenth century France. Ian Coller uncovers the surprising story of the several hundred men, women, and children--Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, and others--who followed the French army back home after Napoleon's occupation of Egypt

Les mythes fondateurs de la « Terreur » ont été en grande partie démantelés par des historiens récents, mais la thèse d'un dérapage nationaliste vers la xénophobie en l'an II est restée assez courante. Certes, dans le contexte de la guerre et la peur du complot, certaines révolutionnaires ont dénoncé « l'étranger » comme un danger existentiel pour la République, or, en pratique, les autorités ne visaient que les sujets des pouvoirs ennemis, surtout les Britanniques, et ces mesures n'ont pas été implémentées de manière suivie. Les étrangers sujets de pouvoirs non-ennemis peuvent servir de test pour cette xénophobie supposée. Trois cas d'étrangers originaires (ou prétendant l'être) des pouvoirs musulmans, qui sont restés neutres ou amis de la France malgré les efforts des alliés de les tourner contre la République, ne montrent aucune évidence de xénophobie généralisée aux moments les plus forts de la « Terreur ». Au contraire, les gestes d'hospitalité étaient très ouverts. Ces cas suggèrent que les attitudes envers les étrangers devraient être comprises dans le contexte politique plus large des alignements et oppositions, et non comme un discours univoque d'exclusion.

Although in most accounts of liberalism Africans appear only as passive victims or beneficiaries of European policies, in the early nineteenth century many Africans shared liberal aspirations for the "good society" based on free trade, constitutional government and individual property. However, African liberalism was articulated in the context of an existential crisis provoked by the new European world order. Hassuna D'Ghies, educated in Tripoli and Europe, articulated an overtly "African" liberal response to this crisis of adaptation through his writings and political activity in London in the 1820s. By the end of the decade, D'Ghies had abandoned this project and returned to North Africa to take up a more authoritarian model of reform that ultimately led to the reabsorption of Tripoli and its region into the Ottoman Empire. D'Ghies's turn toward an "imperial liberalism" underwritten by Islamic legitimacy suggests the impossibility of reconciling African autonomy with European liberal claims to universality, and the ways in which African political thought was fragmented by imperial globalization.

The Echelles du Levant et de Barbarie were French trading centers across the Ottoman Empire that were granted special trading privileges by the sultan. Naturally, their center was in Istanbul, where hundreds of French merchants carried out a large volume of trade across the Mediterranean. In 1781 those merchants wrote to their government to criticize the tight restrictions placed on their everyday life and trade by a new regime of regulation. Their protest revealed the currency of a new idea of the plastic and adaptable human subject, shaped by the cultural environment rather than by innate qualities: a kind of "cosmopolitan subject" that we may associate with Enlightenment thought. But they employed this conception in order to raise the specter of an "infection" spread by such adaptation, necessitating the exclusion of foreigners, and above all the subjects of the sultan, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, from commercial activity between Istanbul and Marseille. Their protests were ultimately successful in scuttling the French government's nascent free-trade policies in regard to the Levant. This article suggests that the legislative activity of the French state intersected in particular ways with ideas about cosmopolitanism over the course of the eighteenth century in the reconstruction of the nature of everyday life for the "Franks" of the Echelles. It investigates how these converging processes worked to dismantle the older Levantine or "Eurasian" cosmopolitanism that had been for centuries the basis for coexistence under Ottoman rule.