Eighteenth-Century Europe

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...

Late-eighteenth-century Precipitation Reconstructions from James Madison’s Montpelier Plantation

JANUARY 2003 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY | A s early colonialists crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to North America, they carried preconceived notions on the variation of climate with latitude. Perhaps not surprisingly, they expected to encounter the same climatic conditions at the same latitudes in the New World as they had experienced in the Old World (Kupperman 1982). While the Gul...

The trade in medicinal leeches in the southern Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century.

The practice of bloodletting or phlebotomy was a predominant feature of western medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the use of medicinal leeches as a mild form of letting blood achieved immense notoriety in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, especially in France. The almost insatiable demand for leeches drove a lucrative trade in these animals, the history of whi...

The Ottoman East and the ‘Moral Geography’ of Europe's Enlightenment

European perceptions of the Islamic Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century have often been read through the prism of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748). His ‘moral geography’ depicted a despotic and decayed Islamic Ottoman polity in contrast to the dynamism displayed in European states. Montesquieu’s comparisons and contrasts between the Ottoman East and Europe appear to support Edwa...

Self-Machinery? Steel Trusses and the Management of Ruptures in Eighteenth-Century Europe.