Precarious Freedom: Manumission in Eighteenth-Century Colombo

The seventeenth-century Dutch hospital in Colombo.

Sri Lanka, known as Ceylon till 1972, is an island which was successively occupied by the Portuguese (1505-1656), the Dutch (1656-1796), and the British (1796-1948). The Portuguese and the Dutch succeeded in conquering only the maritime provinces, the central highlands being under the control of the kings of Kandy, who by force or ruse contrived to keep their kingdom intact from these two Europ...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Chapter 6: Varieties of the Public Sphere To this point, we have encountered changes, as well as continuity, in European politics, economics, society, and thought. Each of these developments contributed to a transformation that some consider the most fundamental transformation of the century -the emergence, between the state sector and private economic sphere, of autonomous institutions of civi...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Bristol

The President introduced his remarks by a short survey of the social and economic conditions in Bristol in the middle of the eighteenth century, with acknowledgments to Latimer's Annals of Bristol in the eighteenth century, Munro Smith's History of the Bristol Royal Infirmary, and other sources. He quoted from English Social History: " Good doctoring rather than better social conditions was the...

Eighteenth Century Medicine in America