Suchergebnisse

A micro-history of eighteenth-century systemic change that places ordinary French lives alongside global advances. This book explores the eighteenth-century modernization of the coastal province of Languedoc. Mining a wealth of archival sources, James Livesey unveils how provincial elites, peasant households, and local political institutions began to implement such changes as establishing a credit system and building networks of natural historians and agronomical innovators who introduced new plants and farm machinery to the region. These practices were gradually embedded in daily life and gave rise to connections between the province and the broader world.

Eighteenth-century Irish intellectual history has enjoyed a revival in recent years. New scholarly resources, such as the Hoppen edition of the papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society and the recently published Berkeley correspondence, have been fundamental to that revival. Since 1986 the journalEighteenth-Century Ireland: Iris an dá chultúrhas sponsored a complex conversation on the meaning and legacy of the eighteenth century in Irish history. Work in the journal and beyond deploying "New British" and Atlantic histories, as well as continuing attention to Europe, has helped to enrich scholarly understanding of the environments in which Irish people thought and acted. The challenge facing historians of Ireland has been to find categories of analysis that could comprehend religious division and acknowledge the centrality of the confessional state without reducing all Irish experience to sectarian conflict. Clearly the thought of the Irish Catholic community could not be approached without an understanding of the life of the Continental Catholic Church.Archivium Hibernicumhas been collecting and publishing the traces of that history for a hundred years and new digital resources such as the Irish in Europe database have extended that work in new directions. The Atlantic and "New British" contexts have been more proximately important for the Protestant intellectual tradition.

The French Revolution has ceased to be the paradigm case of progressive social revolution. Historians increasingly argue that the heart of the revolutionary experience was the Terror and that the Terror prefigured 20thcentury totalitarianism. This article contests that view and argues that totalitarianism is too blunt a category to distinguish between varying experiences of revolution and further questions if revolutionary outcomes are ideologically determined. It argues that by widening the set of revolutions to include 17th and 18th century cases, as well as the velvet revolutions of the 1990s, we can reinterpret the French Revolution as a characteristic case of democratic transition with particular features.