Jean Antoine Paffe et Louis Paffe, maîtres fondeurs à Paris au XVIIIe siècle

WILLIAM CHRISTIE Res Theatralis Histrionica: Acting Coleridge in the Lecture Theater I N LATE AUGUST 1807, THOMAS POOLE RECEIVED A LETTER FROM THE CELEbrated scientist Humphry Davy urging him to persuade their mutual friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to commit to a series ofliterary lectures at the Royal Institution in London: The Managers of the Royal Institution are very anxious to engage him; and I think he might be of material service to the public, and of benefit to his own mind, to say nothing of the benefit his purse might receive. In the present condition of society, his opinions in matters of taste, literature, and metaphysics must have a healthy influence; and unless he soon becomes an actual member of the living world, he must expect to be brought to judgment for ‘hiding his light.’1 Ironically, it would be his withdrawal from “the living world” that Cole­ ridge would go on to make his critical distinction—or, more accurately, his critical persona—when he chose to accept Davy’s offer and step onto the public stage for the second time in his career. No longer the political firebrand he had been in Bristol in 1795, Coleridge the literary lecturer in fashionable London figured himself as an ideal reader—responsive, imagi­ native, philosophical—and proceeded to refashion after his own values the Shakespearean drama that was his almost exclusive subject. Most notori­ ously, Coleridge’s Hamlet became renowned amongst his friends as a thinly disguised projection ofhis own aspirations and anxieties. But this was true, I would suggest, in more ways than have yet been realized, for Coleridge’s critical performance (and criticism as dramatic performance) goes to the heart of his own reading ofHamlet, as it does ofShakespeare’s play, making i. As quoted in Mrs Henry [Margaret EJ Sandford, Thomas Poole and His Friends (London: Macmillan, 1888), 2:193. SiR, 52 (Winter 2013) 485 486 WILLIAM CHRISTIE the lecture theater of the early-nineteenth century the ideal venue for Coleridge on Shakespeare. Ideas, information, and opinions were the social currency of the expand­ ing public sphere of the eighteenth century, and by the early-nineteenth century the production and consumption of scientific and cultural knowl­ edge in Britain’s thriving lecture culture testified to an unprecedented emotional and economic investment. Its combination of display, perfor­ mance, education, and social occasion made the public lecture in science and the arts an alternative form of entertainment, even while the combined activities ofmany and various lecturers covering every topic from insects to angels amounted to an alternative, “open” university, for many of the middle-class public (and most of its women) the only formal instruction to which they had access. Public lectures flourished and by the earlynineteenth century a number of institutions were springing up to house and foster them, first and foremost the institution where Davy had made his reputation and to which he beckoned Coleridge in his letter to Poole. i The Royal Institution was a brainchild of the Royal Society habitue and eccentric Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson, an American citizen who had the distinction of having been knighted by the King of England and created Count by the Elector of Bavaria). Along with a group of Fel­ lows of the Royal Society, including SirJoseph Banks, as well as other citi­ zens of distinction, like the philanthropist Sir Thomas Bernhard, Rumford founded the Royal Institution in 1799 as a center for displaying the latest mechanical inventions, containing a meeting house and a library and offer­ ing lectures and workshops for the poor. Its aims were reflected by the title of Rumford’s Proposal for forming by subscription a public Institution for diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical inven­ tions and improvements (1799).2 By 1800, thanks to Banks and Henry Cavendish, the Royal Institution had a new building in Albemarle Street with a new lecture theater and lab­ oratory installed, featuring throughout the most up-to-date design and ap­ pointments. The emphasis ofcontemporary reports (utilizing the Royal In­ stitution’s own promotional material) was on production and performance: 2. See H|enry] Bence Jones, The Royal Institution: Its Founder and Its First Professors...

The War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), one of the major international conflicts of the eighteenth century, sought to resolve the greatest diplomatic issue of the day: the partition of the Spanish empire. This essay focuses on the Austrian emperor Leopold I's diplomatic efforts in the courts of the Maritime Powers to obtain the Spanish inheritance during the first years of that conflict. The early years of the war (between 1701 and 1705) were a formative period in the development of Habsburg foreign policy. The problems that plagued the Maritime Powers after Leopold's death in 1705, such as the disputes over the deployment of troops, the differences of opinion over precisely how the Spanish empire should be divided and the policy to be followed in dealing with the Hungarian rebels and the elector of Bavaria, and the questions that arose over the alliances with Portugal and Savoy were all either existing or anticipated during the latter years of his reign.

Atlantic, Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern America. By Stephen J. Hornsby. (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2005. Pp. xv, 307. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $29.95.)Stephen Hornsby, Professor of Geography and Canadian Studies at the University of Maine, describes his work as geographical reconceptualization of the (1). He begins by acknowledging the importance of prior studies but suggests they are regional histories that, by their nature, emphasize continuities and interconnectedness. In reality, the places Britain colonized were far from a uniform space or an homogenous system (2). Instead, Hornsby identifies two imperial systems in the Americas. Newfoundland, the West Indies, and Hudson Bay in eastern Canada, from which the derived cod, sugar, and furs, are grouped together as British colonies that remained firmly maritime in their orientation and reliant on metropolitan trade, governance, and military defense throughout the eighteenth century. The North settlements of New England, Virginia, and South Carolina, with their respective cod fishing, tobacco, and rice economies, he calls the American Frontier. Endowed with better natural resources, these mainland colonies developed settled, self-reproducing communities that encouraged the growth of domestic markets in their western hinterlands and reduced dependence on overseas trade. This rift in colonial experiences, Hornsby contends, led inevitably to imperial dissolution in 1776.In Chapters 2 and 3, Hornsby describes the particularities of his six case-study colonies using the staples approach pioneered by Canadian political economist Harold Adams Innis. Innis demonstrated how single industry or commodity determined region's social, economic, and even cultural development. Ironically, an inverse relationship emerges between colony's financial success and community maturation, with the two most lucrative commodities, sugar and cod, producing the least well-developed colonial societies. Successful colonists in the British returned to Britain as soon as they could afford to, leaving over seers or administrators to run their affairs and truncated society reflecting the interests of powerful merchant firms and absentees.An inverse pattern developed in the colonies of the American Frontier. Tobacco farmers initially experienced more precarious economic climate, but when the industry prospered in the early eighteenth century, planters invested their wealth in Virginia great houses rather than in English country estates. South Carolina rice farmers, though often descended from migrating Barbadian sugar planters, emulated their Chesapeake neighbors. Their plantations remained modest, secluded in the remote South Carolina backcountry along with the enslaved workers upon which their wealth depended. But their profits sparkled in the construction and outfitting of beautiful town homes in Charleston, one of the first modern grid-structured cities in the Empire.The second half of the book moves beyond descriptions of landscape, architecture, social structure, and labor systems to grapple with the meaning of these differences for the balance of power within the empire. Hornsby relies heavily on commodity histories for his narratives of places, peoples, and practices, and many of his conclusions will be familiar to scholars in the field. Nor is his argument that inherent structural and cultural fissures existed between the Atlantic and Frontier colonies new; Andrew O'Shaughnessy, whom Hornsby surprisingly does not engage, came to these same conclusions, demonstrating the roles played by familial ties, absentee/residential patterns, and the post-1763 impositions of metropolitan control in North America in leading up to the Revolution (An Empire Divided: The Revolution and the Caribbean [200O]). …

Reviewed by: Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico: Miguel de Quintana's Life and Writings José Antonio Esquibel Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico: Miguel de Quintana's Life and Writings. Edited and translated by Francisco A. Lomelí and Clark A. Colahan. [Series on the Nuevomexicano Literary Heritage.] (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 218. $39.95.) It is rare to have any written record concerning the spiritual reflections of the common person, let alone such an individual as Miguel de Quintana (b. 1677–d. 1748), who came from Mexico City to New Mexico as a settler of the Spanish frontier in 1694. The main reason for the preservation of Quintana's spiritual verses was the use of the Office of the Inquisition as a political tool in an attempt to silence and castigate a voice of criticism against the local clergy of the small frontier Villa de Santa Cruz de la Cañada, the most northern European settlement of the Spanish Americas in the eighteenth century. [End Page 701] Francisco A. Lomelí and Clark A. Colahan present the literary voice of Miguel de Quintana to modern readers and successfully place him as an important figure of New Mexico's literary tradition. Lomelí and Colahan's careful analysis of Quintana's spiritual verses reveals a personal spirituality firmly grounded in the Franciscan tradition of Roman Catholicism. The majority of the book consists of English translations and Spanish transcriptions of the various writings of Quintana, allowing readers of one or both languages access to these rare writings. The verses record the encouragement and guidance of "heavenly voices," such as these words of the Queen of Heaven,"Do not dread suffering/ Suffer, because your hardships/ will find relief, Miguel/ for I will be there to intercede." Evident in Quintana's writings is the Franciscan emphasis on poverty and humility, as well as empathy and compassion for the suffering of Christ and the significant role of the Virgin Mary as intercessor. The fertile influence of the rich and deeply rooted Spanish Catholic tradition that flourished in Mexico City in the seventeenth century nourished the mind and spirituality of Quintana. Unfortunately, his personal motives for volunteering as a settler of New Mexico are not revealed in any of his surviving writings. As a husband and father Quintana sustained his family working as a farmer and a scribe. As a literate individual he was sought by others to record official civil and ecclesiastical proceedings, to write letters, and is known to have written coloquios, plays in the form of extended dialogue. Quintana's criticism of a local Franciscan friar and his defiance of this friar's demand to confess to him stirred a personality conflict that developed into a denunciation to the Inquisition in July, 1732. The formal basis of the denunciation centered on Quintana's written spiritual prose and poetry, which local Franciscan clergy viewed as containing heretical assertions. Although Quintana maintained his innocence throughout the five years of investigation, he chose to bend as a reed with humility toward the authority of the Inquisition rather than to resist or push back. Following a recantation in 1737, he was exonerated, but only after experiencing much psychological and spiritual turmoil, which is apparent when reading his verses. In Part One of the book, Lomelí and Colahan lead the reader through the historical and cultural context of Quintana's era with scholarly insights into the common elements of Quintana's expression that show how his writings fit squarely within the accepted Spanish Roman Catholic mysticism and spiritual expression of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Parts Two and Three they have compiled and organized Quintana's poetry, letters, and essays from a variety of sources,many of which were transcribed from documents in Quintana's handwriting. This book represents an important contribution toward the ongoing documentation of New Mexico's literary tradition, a tradition that extends to the late 1500's. It is also an exceptional source for understanding the personal expression and experience of Roman Catholicism in Spain's North American frontier. José Antonio Esquibel Lakewood, Colorado Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

Data obtained with a questionnaire instrument from managerial employees (N = 200) in Singapore were used to examine some antecedents of subjective career success. The choice of antecedents was informed by recent calls to place research on career issues in the context of an individual's life roles. Confirmatory factor analysis (LISREL VII) was used to examine the one-factor and three-factor models hypothesized to underlie the subjective career success data. The results revealed a three-factor model to have adequate fit statistics - financial and hierarchical success, and career satisfaction. The antecedent sets of human capital, work values, family and structural or work variables accounted for over 40% of the explained variance in each career success dimension. While the career success dimensions were influenced by different variables, individual-organizational value congruity, quality of parental role and internal labor market emerged as consistent antecedents of the career success dimensions. The pattern of significant antecedents of the career success dimensions was interpreted as providing support for the approach that underpinned the study. The limitations of the study, and practical and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

The Society for French Historical Studies met in Lexington, Kentucky, in March 1997 for its annual look at the state of scholarship in French history. As has been the case in recent years, labor was a marginal category in a conference increasingly devoted to cultural history. However, some of the more interesting work occurred at the intersection between histories of class and the new perspectives provided by scholarship on gender and the construction of identity. Participants in a panel on Gender, Work, and Politics in the Longue Dur?e: The Shifting Boundaries of Women's Work confronted why women's work was valued and remunerated at a rate less than the work of men. Traditional explanations attribute the discrepancy to the ways in which women have participated in production: Female workers lacked formal training or skills, and their work patterns were unstable or trun cated because of family obligations. Social scientists have improved upon such simplistic explanations with complex, well-researched monographs and more imaginative syntheses in the last two decades. Joan Scott, how ever, has challenged social historians to examine problems of causality more closely, suggesting the concept of gender as an analytical tool with which to assess long-term changes that are still understood largely as eco nomic phenomena. The three panelists responded to Scott's call by addressing how women challenged the constructed gender boundaries of women's work in France. Carol Coats examined the cultural assumptions shaping women's work and women's family roles during the sixteenth century. Comparing notarial records from the middle of the century to a set of records from 1610, she showed that widows saw the boundaries of their authority and autonomy increasingly constricted?a pattern supported by other local studies of widowhood during the period. Widows were increasingly denied access to traditional economic activities as well, such as hiring male appren tices. Clare Crowston assessed women's guild systems in Paris during the eighteenth century, examining how gender assumptions contributed to the ways in which they were created and regulated. Economic competition

In this Empire of everlasting glory, which opens its portals to all Mankind…this empire is unwalled, its gates are open day and night, and anyone may freely enter and exit.…All who desire to purchase or trade are welcome. In the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, two macrohistorical developments, commercialization and tax farming, opened the door to a series of new transactions that led to major social-structural changes. These changes included increased horizontal integration of the periphery with networks of new actors tied to one another, as well as to brokers vertically integrated into the state. Provincial notables emerged strongly out of these twin processes of macroeconomic change, and by the end of the eighteenth century, they had become significant political actors. Their political acumen was the result of their hard-earned financial success and the slow and sustained spread of their regional governance regimes. Throughout the eighteenth century, notables showed ingenuity at transforming social structures, forming networks of interaction, and connecting to other social groups – especially to central elites, merchants, and peasants – in order to protect their interests and their newly formed lifestyles. The notables were the key agents of Ottoman social transformation because they developed social and economic linkages across their territories, perhaps inadvertently reorganizing the basic skeleton of imperial control that had been based on segmentation and vertical integration. They actively participated in politics, either for or against the state.

B ENJAMIN Thompson, born in 1754 in Woburn, Massachusetts, of unprepossessing New England parents, led one of the most amazing lives in the eighteenth century. Beginning at the age of thirteen as a warehouse apprentice in Salem, Massachusetts, he climbed from the position of major in the New Hampshire militia to that of British Undersecretary of State for the Northern Department, to a colonelcy in the British Army, and to a knighthood conferred by King George III. He became the favorite of the Elector of Bavaria, and rose through the highest offices of state in that country to be made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. His genius for public administration was almost unequalled, and he ranks as one of the most important scientists of his age. Material only recently available shows that one of his favorite methods of seeking rewards in high places was by serving as a military and political informer.

If women in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought the perfect crime in which to participate, selecting receiving stolen goods provided excellent opportunities for profit and little chance of punishment. Low conviction rates, combined with the fact that no behaviour outside of gendered expectations was required in its commission, made dealing in stolen goods relatively easy for women in the metropolis. Although this particular offence has not been deeply analysed by historians of crime, its commission did alarm contemporaries, including members of the legal community and social commentators. This paper explores accusations against females in London for receiving, as well as the important roles that familial relationships and work played in their indictments for the crime.

Reviewed by: Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, and: Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England Barrett Kalter (bio) Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg, eds. Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. x+246pp. US$69.95. ISBN 978-0-415-94953-8. Amanda Vickery . Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. xviii+382pp. US$45. ISBN 978-0-300-15453-5. The twelve strong essays collected in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century illuminate the circuits of production and consumption that moved furniture and decorative objects from city to countryside, back and forth across the Atlantic, as well as the social pressures that imbued those objects with significance. The first of four thematically organized sections maps the global itinerary of materials and styles. Madeleine Dobie's terrific essay studies the use of luxury woods from French colonies in the West Indies to construct furniture in an Orientalist style. She argues that the exotic guise of the furniture concealed from metropolitan consumers the slave economy that supplied them. Chaela Pastore discusses the vogue for mahogany; though the wood grew in Saint Domingue, Creoles who bought mahogany furniture were criticized for mimicking the elites in France who wanted to monopolize this luxury as a token of national and racial purity. David Porter's chapter returns to the topic of Orientalism by way of a treatise on aesthetics by William Hogarth. Chinoiserie exemplified the features that Hogarth claimed had universal appeal (for example, novelty, asymmetry, and femininity), yet the style repelled him. Porter shows that the Chinese style was often satirized as a source of female pleasure that displaced men; its connotations thus undermined the heterosexual dynamic implicit in Hogarth's theory of beauty. While Pastore and Porter examine efforts to regulate fashion, the second set of essays profile people who carried fashions across [End Page 427] geographical and social boundaries. Natacha Coquery reconstructs the business of a Parisian upholsterer whose trade in second-hand goods broadened access to high-end fashions. With the help of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vermont woodworker James Wilson produced the first globes for sale in the new Republic. David Jaffee records Wilson's achievement as an instance of "Village Enlightenment," whereby cosmopolitan knowledge was introduced to the provinces by commerce (81). Jaffee complicates the centre-periphery model of diffusion, though, by showing how American artisans often adapted English styles to local tastes and thereby signalled their nation's independence. Kathryn Norberg analyzes the ways in which courtesans appropriated features from aristocratic interiors in order to create the novel and seductive environments in which they plied their trade. The third section of the volume continues this investigation of the domestic interior with Donna Bohanan's discussion of noble houses in provincial France. The decoration of these homes closely resembled those in Paris and Versailles, a consequence, Bohanan argues, of a change in laws that deepened the division between old and new aristocracy by taxing the latter more heavily. Goaded by this check to their aspirations, parvenus in the provinces embraced the elite style emanating from the court and city to assert the authenticity of their rank. Anyone who has ploughed straight through the museum galleries devoted to ceramic dinnerware, bored by so much sameness, should definitely read Mimi Hellman's compelling semiotic analysis of the matched set. Hellman argues that seriality would have been alluring prior to industrialization, given the difficulty of manufacturing apparently identical objects by hand. The matched set was priced beyond the reach of most consumers, but for those who could afford them, their multiplicity provided a pleasing sense of continuity and order. The meuble, a matched set of furniture, could unite a group of people while signalling differences in status among them, depending on the type of chair one sat on and its position in the room. Mary Salzman suggests that a pair of eighteenth-century paintings taught people to interpret interiors in just this way. Noting a standard reading of the objects in Jean-François de Troy's The Garter and The Declaration...

In the nineteenth century, the Middle East’s Christian and Jewish minorities registered conspicuous economic advances relative to the Muslim majority. These advances were made possible by the choice of law available to non‐Muslim subjects. Until the late eighteenth century, on matters critical to financial and commercial success, non‐Muslims tended to exercise this privilege in favor of Islamic law, and this pattern prompted their own court systems to emulate Islamic legal practices. However, as Western Europe developed the legal infrastructure of modern capitalism, vast numbers of Christians and Jews made jurisdictional switches by obtaining the protection of European states. Along with tax concessions, they thus gained the ability to conduct business under Western laws.

In the nineteenth century the Middle East's Christian and Jewish minorities registered conspicuous economic advances relative to the Muslim majority. These advances are generally linked to trans-national networks stretching into Western Europe. Left unclear is why non-Muslims joined these networks in vastly disproportionate numbers and why the networks proved especially lucrative in the early modern era. The missing link is the choice of law available to non-Muslim subjects. Until the late eighteenth century, on matters critical to financial and commercial success non-Muslims tended to exercise this privilege in favor of Islamic law; and this pattern prompted their own court systems to emulate Islamic legal practices. However, as Western Europe developed the legal infrastructure of modern capitalism, vast numbers of Christians and Jews made jurisdictional switches by obtaining the protection of European states. Along with tax concessions, they thus gained the ability to conduct business under Western laws.

Canadian Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760-1969. Edited by Nancy Christie. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 381. $75.00 clothbound; $27.95 paperback.) Among historians of the English-speaking world studying the family and gender relations the now-standard interpretation of the transformation of gender relations in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, most fully articulated by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall in their landmark British work Family Fortunes that appeared in the late 1980's, goes something like this: the simultaneous rise of capitalism and evangelicalism led to the creation among the middle classes of a new form of marriage, the companionate marriage, a relationship that on the one hand valued individual identity and on the other intense affective ties among family members. This development was in turn accompanied by the emergence of separate spheres, the domestic sphere dominated by women, and that outside of the home by men. Recently, family and gender historians have developed substantial revisions to this interpretation, and the authors of this volume offer a major contribution to this endeavor in the Canadian context, beginning with the issue of the nuclear family and the rise of individualism. In his examination of the Roman Catholic parish in rural, French-speaking Quebec during the late seventeenth through to the early nineteenth century, Ollivier Hubert rebuts John Bossy's influential view that Tridentine Catholicism resulted in individualism. Rather, he argues the nuclear family was a prime agent through which the clergy inculcated Tridentine belief and practice, a strategy that relied upon communal pressure and traditional collective identities. Family ties also proved salient for religious behavior in the nineteenth century. In her statistical study of church affiliation as reported in the census returns for the mid-nineteenth-century parish of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Hannah M. Lane traces how denominational affiliation was no mere individual choice but instead followed family ties, a pattern that Christine Hudon reveals existed among a French-speaking Protestant community in Quebec's Eastern Townships. The concept of separate spheres, which it was argued mainly relegated women to maternal and domestic roles, has not fared so well either. J. I. Little discovers that for the Reverend James Reid, an Anglican ministering in Quebec's Eastern Townships in the early 1800's, a companionate marriage coexisted with the exercise of patriarchal authority, particularly when it came to the raising and education of children. Marguerite Van Die in her study of the small, mid-Victorian Ontario town of Brantford shows how women's participation in evangelical churches enabled them to secure a prominent place in the public life of their community. Likewise, Kenneth L. Draper examines women's interdenominational organizations in London, Ontario, and their engagement in urban moral reform and religious renewal. The ways in which various cultures understood gender also shaped how men and women responded to clerically defined religious norms and approved cultural practices. …

The Paradoxes of Slavery in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko Diana Jaher Critics generally base their analyses of ambivalent representations of slavery in Oroonoko, Thomas Southerne's popular 1695 play, on its hero.1 By concentrating on Oroonoko, an African prince, many scholars argue that Southerne (1660–1746) objects, not to slavery, but to either the enslavement of aristocrats2 or the institution's excessive brutality.3 Like his prototype in the play's source, Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko; Or The Royal Slave (1688), Oroonoko, is, in fact, an extraordinary case: an idealized member of the nobility whose English owners condemn his bondage and exempt him and his wife, Imoinda, from the harsh labor and punishments that slaves typically experience. Lesser-born slaves, the play appears to conclude, deserve their condition, if not its associated cruelties. Southerne's Oroonoko, however, depicts a third slave of almost equal importance to the prince and his wife: Oroonoko's attendant, Aboan, second only to the title character in the original production's printed cast list.4 While some scholars include Aboan in their critiques of Southerne's attitude toward slavery, they often minimize his presence5 or characterize him as a "kneeling, supplicant African."6 Yet he proves himself Oroonoko's equal—at times his superior—in insight and initiative throughout the play and voices much of its antislavery rhetoric. By focusing on Aboan, I explore a tension in Oroonoko that registers a fundamental critique of slavery as an institution that is absent from Behn's novella: Southerne subverts one major rationalization he offers for enslavement—the traditional aristocratic justification that slaves are naturally inferior and therefore suited to bondage7 —by presenting an exceptional, nonaristocratic slave.8 [End Page 51] Southerne's personal beliefs regarding slavery are impossible to discern in Oroonoko: the play presents a range of attitudes. Rosenthal and Jordan and Love mention that at the time Oroonoko was written, the playwright sought financial support from Christopher Codrington (1668–1710), a wealthy slave owner who treated his slaves with unusual benevolence by baptizing and educating them.9 While the influence of Codrington's humanitarian actions (which did not extend to freeing the slaves) may have informed some of the play's language—Aboan's graphic descriptions of physical abuse, for example—Southerne's desire for a patron's money is not necessarily evidence of the dramatist's own opinions. More likely, the playwright shared his countrymen's prevailing attitudes toward slavery: despite English distaste for the institution—slavery was not legally sanctioned in England, although it was in her colonies10 — many recognized "its apparent contribution to the collective wealth and power of the empire."11 Whatever their personal feelings, most English accepted slavery with an accommodation made more palatable by the institution's distance—Surinam, Oroonoko's setting, was an ocean away—and thought little more about it.12 Given their views, it is unlikely that English audiences for Southerne's play closely analyzed its position on slavery. Not until the late eighteenth century, when antislavery rhetoric was more widespread, was Oroonoko considered an abolitionist text.13 English enthusiasm for "collective wealth" informs much of the play's pro-slavery stance. The Whigs, the decade's dominant party, favored property and property owners, for they believed that "men who possessed sufficient wealth to give them a firm stake in society"14 had the incentive and ability to contribute to the economic and political health of their country. Southerne's political beliefs are hazy: initially a Tory, the playwright changed sides after the Glorious Revolution of 1688—perhaps only outwardly—possibly to aid his professional advancement.15 He dedicated Oroonoko to William Cavendish (1641–1707), the Duke of Devonshire and a prominent Whig. Moreover, he wrote in an era dominated by Whiggish values. Given that the financial success of most English colonial ventures, including the Surinam plantations for which Oroonoko's slaves are bought, was unimaginable without the use of slave labor, several passages in the play evoke key aspects of Whiggish political oratory that emphasize and support slaves' status as property and slave [End Page 52] owners' rights to their property.16 When Aboan begs Oroonoko to lead a...

This study aims to discuss the significant role of “peasant society” in understanding the economic history of both modern and early modern Japan.Independent peasant households proliferated in Japan in the seventeenth century, and from around the turn of the eighteenth century onwards they underwent a transformation into entities calledie,which owned family properties and bore responsibility for conveying these properties to the next generation. Although the development of the market economy also contributed to maintaining and activating the peasant society, the function of the labour market was strongly influenced by the strategy of peasant households to pursue the optimal utilization of slack labour generated by the seasonally fluctuating labour demand from agriculture. Under these constraints, peasant households tended to deliver non-agricultural employment opportunities to their members, forming a kind of barrier against mobilizing family workers outside the household. These barriers were supported by region-based industrial development such as a weaving industry adopting the putting-out system most suitable to the requirements of peasant households. Rural-based capital accumulation together with the workings of the regional financial markets contributed to maintaining particular peasant household behaviours by supporting region-based industrial development, which featured in Japan's path of economic and social development from the early modern to the modern period.