Discusses the views of great thinkers from 1750 to 1850-- including Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, and Friedrich Engels-- toward the condition of the poor in England.

Since its publication in 1976, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America hasbeen recognized as a classic study of the career of the foremost politicalpamphleteer of the Age of Revolution, and a model of how to integrate thepolitical, intellectual, and social history of the struggle for Americanindependence.Foner skillfully brings together an account of Paine's remarkable career witha careful examination of the social worlds within which he operated, in GreatBritain, France, and especially the United States. He explores Paine's politicaland social ideas and the way he popularized them by pioneering a new form ofpolitical writing, using simple, direct language and addressing himself to areading public far broader than previous writers had commanded. He shows whichof Paine's views remained essentially fixed throughout his career, whiledirecting attention to the ways his stance on social questions evolved under thepressure of events. This enduring work makes clear the tremendous impact Paine'swriting exerted on the American Revolution, and suggests why he failed to have asimilar impact during his career in revolutionary France. And it offers newinsights into the nature and internal tensions of the republican outlook thathelped to shape the Revolution.In a new preface, Foner discusses the origins of this book and the influencesof the 1960s and 1970s on its writing. He also looks at how Paine has beenadopted by scholars and politicians of many stripes, and has even been calledthe patron saint of the Internet.

"This book focuses on the importance of ideological and institutional factors in the rapid development of the British economy during the years between the Glorious Revolution and the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Joel Mokyr shows that we cannot understand the Industrial Revolution without recognizing the importance of the intellectual sea changes of Britain's Age of Enlightenment. In a vigorous discussion, Mokyr goes beyond the standard explanations that credit geographical factors, the role of markets, politics, and society to show that the beginnings of modern economic growth in Britain depended a great deal on what key players knew and believed, and how those beliefs affected their economic behavior. He argues that Britain led the rest of Europe into the Industrial Revolution because it was there that the optimal intersection of ideas, culture, institutions, and technology existed to make rapid economic growth achievable. His wide-ranging evidence covers sectors of the British economy often neglected, such as the service industries." -- Publisher description.

The external economy of British North America has attracted considerable scholarly attention in the last two generations, and the papers reprinted here, in this second collection from Jacob Price, make important contributions to quantification, conceptualisation and debate. Studies presenting and analysing new statistical material from the English and Scottish customs accounts are supplemented by a general survey of the transatlantic economy in the 18th century which is required reading for all students of the subject. Price's treatment is diversified into financial arrangements and the role of credit in the slave trade and plantation economies. In a provocative chapter "Who cared about the colonies?," concern in Britain for the 13 colonies between 1714 and 1775 is explored in terms of the ability of the colonies to involve the interests and command the attention and concern of people in Britain from the politically eminent to those in trade and to the nation at large.

A new edition of Kaplan's landmark study on eighteenth-century French political economy, reissued with a new Foreword by Sophus A. Reinert. Based on research in all the Parisian depots and more than fifty departmental archives and specialized and municipal libraries, Kaplan's classic work constitutes a major contribution to the study of the subsistence problem before the French Revolution and the political economy of deregulatory reform. Anthem Press is proud to reissue this path breaking work together with a significant new historiographic companion volume by the author, "The Stakes of Regulation: Perspectives on 'Bread, Politics and Political Economy' Forty Years Later."

Mr. Lopez reinterprets the civilization of the High Renaissance in Italy as a dramatic succession of three ages: Youth, 1454-1494; Maturity, 1494-1527; Decline, 1527-1559. In the first period, political and economic stabilization brings forth a mood of confident expectation which expresses itself in literature, art, and philosophy, all reaching for a goal of "self-centered aesthetic harmony." In the second period, a series of foreign invasions shatters the political and economic well-being of the Indian elite but does not slow down the artistic and literary drive. Whether in hope or in sorrow, in response to shock or in escape from reality, the Renaissance attains its glorious climax. The third period is torn between conflicting tendencies. The political battle is lost but there is a second economic revival; art and literature give out despondent notes but successfully explore new channels; philosophic permissiveness comes to an end but scientific reserach comes into its own. Mr. Lopez's tripartition of an age which is usually described as a single sweep adds depth to the definition of the Italian Renaissance. It is enhanced by his fresh translations of Renaissance poems and by twenty-four illustrations which pick out from the incomparable wealth of Renaissance art a few historically significant works. All the famous names are there, from Lorenzo de'Medici to Ariosto, Machiavelli, and Cardano, from Botticelli to Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Palladio; but one also meets a large number of minor figures and anonymous people in the street. America is discovered; new diseases appear; anti-Semitism reawakens; religious unity is destroyed - these and other events form the backdrop. The sparkling narration is thoroughly grounded in contemporary sources.

These essays demonstrate that American political culture was fashioned in a dialogue between Federalists and Jeffersonians. They portray an active Federalist coalition that offered a vibrant intellectual and political alternative throughout the era of the early republic. Cutting across boundaries of region, culture, race, gender, and class, Federalists struggled with the problems of nation building, national identity, and economic development.

"In a world that is constantly awake, illuminated and exposed, there is much to gain from looking into the darkness of times past. This fascinating and vivid picture of nocturnal life in Middle Eastern cities shows that the night in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire created unique conditions for economic, criminal, political, devotional and leisurely pursuits that were hardly possible during the day. Offering the possibility of livelihood and brotherhood, pleasure and refuge; the darkness allowed confiding, hiding and conspiring - activities which had far-reaching consequences on Ottoman state and society in the early modern period. Instead of dismissing the night as merely a dark corridor between days, As Night Falls demonstrates how fundamental these nocturnal hours have been in shaping the major social, cultural and political processes in the early modern Middle East"--

International scholars and specialists in Jewish, German, British and European history offer this first comparative approach to the study of German and British Jewish history from the late 18th century to the 1930s. The volume's comparative dimension goes beyond a parallel exploration of the Jewish experience in the two societies by examining British and German Jewries in equal measure and discussing a broad spectrum of social, political, cultural and economic issues.

"In Apogee of Empire, the authors argue that the inability to renovate the Hapsburg legacies reflected reluctance to undertake radical changes first at home, then in Spain's relationship with its colonies." "The Steins trace in detail efforts to reform the Spanish establishment in the early 1760s, initially under the leadership of the marques de Esquilache, who accompanied Charles from Naples. Reformers had to determine which adjustments could be made without risking radical innovation. The ensuring seven-year conflict between reformers and traditionalists ended in a coup that outsted Esquilache. The authors then analyze the shift in focus to the colonies and the emphasis on incrementally modifying a key element of Spanish colonialism, transatlantic trade, via so-called free trade within the imperial system. Comercio libre, like most Bourbon reformism in general, neither realized a colonial pact nor improved Spain's competitive position in the Atlantic trading system. At the time of Charles III's death, the authors conclude, Spain had only made superficial changes, rather than the profound transformation the situation demanded, and by 1789 Spain and its wealthiest colony, New Spain, would be ill-prepared for the coming decades of upheaval in Europe and America."--Jacket

In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can ignore the cultural history of the Jews during the ancien régime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish community—including the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution.Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix. In the ancien régime, ritual systems were a formative element in the traditional worldview and served as a crucial repository of memories and values. After the Revolution, ritual signaled changes in the way Jews related to the state, French society, and French culture. In the cities especially, ritual assumed a performative function that dramatized the epoch-making changes of the day. The terms and concepts of the Jewish religious tradition thus remained central to the discourse of modernization and played a powerful role in helping French Jews interpret the diverse meanings and implications of emancipation. Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity.