Eighteenth Century Research Articles

Abstract This article focuses on early modern rural economic practices, investigating the scope for action that emerges when we trace how money was handled, loaned and borrowed. The aim is to contextualize probate inventories and interlink them with other sources to reveal the plurality of economic activities in which people engaged. We look at two case studies from early modern southern Tyrol between the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries: a wealthy widow who held her first husband’s agricultural estate in usufruct and managed it successfully over many years, and an innkeeper whose probate inventory is testament to his substantial businesses, commercial activities and family financial dealings. Both can be termed rural entrepreneurs based on their skilful economic activity, from lending and trading to saving, which only becomes apparent when the legal procedures and documents are closely examined. The main sources are local court records, and in the first case we examine their interlinkage based on a database. The results not only expand our knowledge of female and male rural actors but also enable us to observe social groups and their pluri-activities and credit relations, particularly within the middle stratum of a rural economy a socio-economic middle stratum that has received little attention to date.

This work examines how the Silk Road functioned not only as a trade route but also as a cultural and religious network that enabled the spread of Buddhism from India to China between the 5th and 10th centuries CE. By analyzing historical records, pilgrim accounts, and archaeological evidence, this paper shows how monks, merchants, and rulers played vital roles in translating, adapting, and embedding Buddhist teachings in Chinese society. In this work, particular attention is given to key figures such as Faxian, Xuanzang, and Yijing, as well as to significant sites including the Mogao Caves, Kizil Caves, and Bezeklik Caves. These sources demonstrate the dynamic process of cultural adaptation in which Indian Buddhist traditions were blended with Chinese aesthetics, philosophy, and political structures. The findings reveal that Buddhism not only spread geographically but also transformed into a uniquely Chinese form, deeply integrated into literature, art, and governance. This research highlights the Silk Roads importance as a medium of cultural transformation and shows that Buddhisms spread was a process of active negotiation and adaptation rather than passive diffusion.

Eastern India, particularly Bengal and to some extent northeast Andhra Pradesh, was a major hub in the Indian Ocean sugar trade. The fertile and well-watered areas of this vast region were able to meet the growing demand for sugar in the intra-Asian trade. Although sugar exports from Bengal began to decline in the second half of the eighteenth century, it continued to be consumed both locally and regionally. Little is known about the role of eastern India in the early modern regional and overseas sugar trade. This article makes a modest contribution to the region’s experience of commercial agriculture by describing sugarcane cultivation, sugar production and trade. It explains why the sugar export trade became marginal and how regional consumption remained resilient in the late eighteenth century. It sheds light on the region’s participation in intra-Asian trade, sugarcane cultivation and sugar production practices using data from the Dutch East India Company archives and other early colonial documents.

Abstract Climate simulations of the industrial era typically start in 1850, using the first fifty years as a baseline for ‘pre-industrial’ climate. However, the period immediately prior to 1850 is of particular interest due to early human influence and heightened volcanic activity, the latter of which led to cooler global temperatures than those observed in the subsequent historical period. In this study, we present a suite of Earth system model simulations (using UKESM1.1) that start in 1750 and span the entire industrial period. We compare these simulations to a new instrumental observation-based dataset, GloSATref, which provides global surface air temperature variations from 1781 onwards. We investigate the climatic changes during the early industrial period, separating the effects of natural and anthropogenic forcings. Model-simulated early-19th-century temperature patterns show substantial cooling relative to the long-term mean, particularly in low latitudes, which agree well with observed patterns. We find significant long-term differences between simulations initialised in 1750 and 1850, with lasting effects well into the 20th century, consistent with differences in vegetation and the substantial ocean cooling driven by high volcanic activity in the 1750 simulations. Our results indicate that an earlier start to historical simulations could lead to more representative climate simulations over the historical period, and deepen our understanding of early anthropogenic warming, natural climate variability, and the climate responses to future volcanic eruptions.

In the early eighteenth century, Dominique Parennin, a French Jesuit missionary in China, wrote at the behest of the Emperor Kangxi a manuscript in the Manchu language which combined some of the theories of traditional Chinese medicine with Western medical concepts. One of the surviving manuscripts of this "Manchu Anatomy," sent by Parennin to the French Royal Academy of Sciences in 1723, is now kept in the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. This work, "Ge ti ciowan lu bithe," has recently been translated into modern Mongolian, affording an opportunity to research Parennin, his life and work, and the significance of the "Manchu Anatomy."

Abstract. Over the past decade, geological and historical evidence has increasingly suggested the existence of a vast ancient lake in central Iran, herein referred to as the Paleo Mega Lake of Rey (PAMELA). This study employs an interdisciplinary methodology to identify and geographically correlate historical references and terminologies associated with the lake. By analyzing over 350 sources, including travelogues, city histories, and ancient religious texts, we reconstructed the probable location, hydrological timeline, and cultural impact of the lake. Findings suggest that PAMELA has been referenced by various historical names such as Faraxkurt and Saveh Lake, and that it significantly influenced the livelihood of ancient communities. The integrated analysis points to a high probability of sustained water presence between 10 000 BCE and the 6th century CE.

Wood from the 4th − 7th century CE in Kuča Caves in Xinjiang, China: Past vegetation and preliminary wood utilization

The Patiṉeṇkīḻkkaṇakku (The Eighteen Minor Works) form a significant corpus in Tamil literature, emerging during the post-Sangam era (c. 3rd to 5th century CE). While the earlier Sangam literature focused on Akam (Subjective life, mainly love) and Puṟam (Objective life, mainly war and heroism), these eighteen works, particularly the eleven didactic texts (Aṟanūlkaḷ), prioritize Aṟam (Virtue or Dharma) and establish a comprehensive moral framework for individual and social life. This research paper examines the core life values promulgated by these texts, especially Tirukkuṟaḷ and Nālaṭiyār. Key ethical values include the supremacy of Domestic Virtue (Illaram) based on love and duty; the importance of Giving (Īkai) and Hospitality (Viruntōmpal) as fundamental social obligations; and the insistence on Integrity (Vāymai) and Humility (Aṭakkam) in personal conduct. Furthermore, the texts stress the significance of Education (Kalvi) as the true, imperishable beauty. A crucial underlying theme is the doctrine of Impermanence (Nilaiyāmai), which urges individuals to perform good deeds while life and wealth endure. The Patiṉeṇkīḻkkaṇakku texts thus serve as a timeless moral compass, shaping the ethical and cultural identity of the Tamil society.

ABSTRACT John Brown was pastor at Kettering Baptist Chapel, now Fuller Baptist Church, from 1751–1771. During this lengthy pastorate, he oversaw the building of a new chapel and contributed to the foundation of the Northamptonshire Baptist Association. While he was respected and appreciated by his congregation, his ministry ended acrimoniously. This article explores his ministry in the later eighteenth century, and examines some of the difficulties he experienced.

ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered dimensions of Chala identity in Soviet and post-Soviet Tajikistan, focusing on a Persianate Jewish community historically shaped by forced religious conversion and enduring social marginalization. 1 In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term Chala denoted Jews who had converted to Islam, often under coercion, yet remained socially distinct and spatially positioned between Muslim and Jewish quarters. Russian imperial sources categorized them as ‘Jewish-Muslims’ (evrei-musulmane), highlighting their hybrid status. While Soviet indigenization policies opened some paths for Chala men to seek social mobility and professional success, women’s options remained limited. Through personal narratives, memory practices and embodied knowledge, such as culinary traditions, this article reveals how Chala women involuntarily maintained the Chala heritage under conditions of silence. This study argues that identity is transmitted not only through formal genealogies but also through informal channels such as rumour, reputation and the intergenerational memory, processes that disproportionately shape women’s experiences.

During routine biomonitoring in Europe, an unknown Fragilaria taxon was frequently observed in western Europe, that was initially identified as Fragilaria pectinalis, a species described in the late eighteenth century from the UK and often misidentified. The epitype material of Conferva pectinalis collected in 1802 by Dillwyn was analysed using both light and scanning electron microscope observations. Additional historic material from the Rabenhorst and Grunow collections was likewise investigated and compared to the unknown French Fragilaria populations identified in Wetzel & Ector (2015) as F. pectinalis. While the Rabenhorst material was identified as F. pectinalis, the taxon described by Grunow as Synedra capitellata f. striis-distantioribus was transferred to the genus Fragilaria and raised to species level. The French populations showed sufficient morphological differences to be separated as a new species, Fragilaria lucectorii, based on valve outline, shape of the apices and stria density. Comparisons are made with similar taxa and brief notes on their ecology are added.

ABSTRACT This article explores evidence for a Baptist presence in Sheffield, a northern town in England, earlier than has until now been assumed. From the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 until the early eighteenth century a distinct group of Baptists, sometimes describing themselves as a church, existed as part of the mixed Dissenting congregation of the town. The influence of Thomas Hollis, a London Baptist merchant, and Timothy Jollie, the pastor of the church, is highlighted. The experience of these Baptists within wider Dissent during the difficult years of the late seventeenth century provides an insight into the denomination's early history.

This article examines the manuscript Opp. Nn. 211 of the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, attributed to Antonio Baldinucci (1665-1717), as an exemplary case of Jesuit missionary preaching in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The thirteen “ragionamenti” it contains reflect the Ignatian tradition of the Spiritual Exercises and the Tridentine doctrine of penance, but above all they reveal a homiletic strategy centered on the stirring of the emotions. The rhetorical-stylistic analysis highlights the systematic use of biblical and patristic quotations, of similes drawn from everyday experience, of exempla and vivid imagery, as well as figures such as hypotyposis, apostrophe, and dialogismus, all aimed at intensifying the dramatic and performative dimension of the sermon. Conceived for oral delivery rather than for print, these sermons demonstrate how Jesuit rhetoric deliberately selected techniques of strong emotional impact, adapting them to a rural and uneducated audience in accordance with the principle of accommodatio. Far from being improvised discourses, the “ragionamenti” of the manuscript show a solid and purposeful rhetorical culture, which made visuality and emotion the cornerstones of missionary persuasion.

In his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970), John Marco Allegro claimed that an obscure, 12th century CE fresco of the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Plaincourault Chapel in Mérigny, France, provided evidence of the persistence in Christian Europe of an underground sacred mushroom sect that had survived since New Testament times. At the heart of Allegro’s claim is the mushroom-like appearance of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the picture. Following up on Allegro’s claim, a small group of writers, led by Boston University’s Carl A. P. Ruck, spent decades seeking to validate Allegro’s theory by seeking out other examples of psychedelic mushrooms hidden in early Christian and Medieval art. The present article centers its discussion on the claims put forward by Allegro and his followers about the Plaincourault tree, but also about other images concerning which they have made similar claims. It concludes that the claims of Allegro and his followers concerning the Plaincourault tree fail due to their tendency to overpress similarities while ignoring differences.

ABSTRACT Catherine Hall has helped to rewrite British history, turning attention to gender, colonialism, and racial capitalism. This presents an in-depth interview with Hall, surveying her career from the late 1960s to the present, starting with her recent work unearthing the history of British slaveowning in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notably in working to build the archive, The Legacies of British Slavery, as well as writing a case study of the slaveholder and early historian of Jamaica, Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the history of racial capitalism (2024). Such a focus contributes to what Hall calls a ‘reparative history’. Overall, the interview recounts Hall’s path as an historian, responding to cultural and political movements, especially to feminism and anti-racism. Influenced by radical historians, such as E.P. Thompson, who drew attention to the working class, Hall turned attention to the role of gender in making the English class system, notably in Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850 (co-authored with Leonore Davidoff and Hall 1987). Through the 1980s and 90s, she focused more concertedly on the nation, race, and colonialism in books such as Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (2002). In addition, Hall also reflects on history writing itself, as well as comments on her lifelong partnership with Stuart Hall, in particular the time in Birmingham during the 1960s and 70s while he was directing the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Abstract Eighteenth-century Stockholm saw a rise in illegitimate births. Yet, premarital sex was illegal, and the early modern household offered few private spaces. Where did unmarried people meet for courtship, intimacy and sex in the early modern city? In this article, we explore the spaces used for illicit sex through a database containing baptismal records of illegitimate children in eighteenth-century Stockholm. We use these records to map the locations where and approximate times when mothers stated their children were conceived. We find that shared households and workplaces were the most common meeting places for couples, that sexual activity took place towards the city centre and not on its outskirts and that urban households in the eighteenth century appear to have been characterized by a porousness and openness that allowed for the creation of pockets of privacy. Lastly, we find little evidence for any organized sex trade in the sources.

Abstract By investigating 321 smuggling vessels that travelled between the Faroe Isles and the British Isles between 1775 and 1785, this article explores the regionality and seasonality of illegal trade in the north Atlantic. The article centres on a neglected oceanic region, thereby inverting historical geographies, shifting the focus from port centres like London and Copenhagen to the Scottish Northern and Western Isles, as well as the Faroe Islands. Epitomizing the ‘dichotomy of insularity’, in the eighteenth century these areas were located along maritime highways of global trade, and illegal trade flourished there, despite their challenging location. The article demonstrates that this illegal trade had different seasonal cycles from those of legal trade. While legal trade halted in the winter season, illegal trade continued throughout. Linking illegal maritime activities to more lawful ones, like fishing, the article suggests that the recurring nature of the contraband trade ought to be understood in relation to the broader coastal culture, in which maritime knowledge was circulated and the local relationship to the sea defined. The study suggests that illegal trade should be viewed not merely as an extension of globalization but as a rooted phenomenon, which developed in unison with the local environment.

This essay deals with Scottish intellectual history, beginning with John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and ending on the threshold of the early Scottish Enlightenment. The essay is structured through the prism of three perspectives that complement each other. The first level is the foundational idea that Scottish intellectual life between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth centuries was given a certain unity and continuity by the early impulse of Duns Scotus’ work. The crucial and tragic intersections of the ecclesiastical history played a major role in the development of a cultural uniqueness. The second level is that Scottish thought in this period was distinctively open to continental European influence, much more so than England, and certainly in the area of the law. Finally, there is a more implicit and submerged level according to which the specific features of the Enlightenment in Scotland were owing to this distinctively Scotist intellectual tradition and in particular to an entirely local evolution of a (reformed) scholastic orientation which - integrated with the theological novelties of Humanism and the Reformation as well as challenged by the breach of Cartesianism - ventures towards very original epistemological forms, which lay the foundations for the flowering of an exceptional period for Scotland.

Abstract Kusatsu–Shirane volcano is one of the most active volcanoes in Japan; however, knowledge of the historical activity of its summit cones is limited, because a major fire in 1869 in the Kusatsu spa area at the foot of the volcano destroyed many historical documents. Until this study, historical eruptions at Mt. Motoshirane, one of pyroclastic cones, had not been documented, and the cone remained unmonitored prior to the 2018 eruption. In this study, we focus on historical bird’s-eye views (BEVs), which exhibit characteristics of both drawings and maps. Numerous BEVs of the Kusatsu spa area have been preserved, because they were frequently published and widely circulated as souvenirs from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Based on analyses of 69 BEVs, along with five historical notes and two pictorial maps and a sketch from the eighteenth century onward, a plume activity at Mt. Motoshirane has been identified in one of the BEVs for the first time. This indicates that either a transient, vigorous fumarolic activity or a single eruptive event occurred at Motoshirane cone during 1818–1830. We demonstrate that volcanic plume activity of Mt. Shirane, one of the pyroclastic cones, has persisted over the past 200 years, with the exception of a quiescent period during 1849–1881 AD. Since 1941, thermal activity has changed from persistent plume emissions to a hot crater lake. Numerous BEVs which were frequently published are useful tool for reconstructing past thermal activity, such as small phreatic eruptions, fumaroles, and hot crater lakes.

This study presents the results of osteoarchaeological and isotopic analyses conducted on human skeletal remains from the site of Fort Amsterdam, an eighteenth century depot that held enslaved captives on the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. Owing to coastal erosion, human burials are frequently exposed, and partial burials have therefore been recovered in the context of rescue excavations over several years by archaeologists from two institutions. Archival evidence indicates that this burial ground was used by the African and Afro-Caribbean population of St. Eustatius, but is unclear about whether its use was restricted to the captives at Fort Amsterdam or whether it also served the wider population of the island. We applied osteological analysis to construct biological profiles for these individuals (n=22) including information about sex, age, and palaeopathology. We also conducted multiple isotope (strontium, oxygen, carbon) analysis on a subset of the individuals (n=6) to determine if they were locally born or first generation forced migrants, assess their childhood diets, and investigate their natal origins. Despite preservation challenges, the osteological analysis showed that this population consisted of 4 non-adults (3 infants and 1 adolescent), 16 adults (including 3 females and 1 male), and 2 unidentifiable individuals. Observed pathologies included dental pathologies and occupational markers. These findings, while limited, provide information about the life experiences of the buried population. Meanwhile, the isotopic analysis indicated that three adult female individuals were born in Africa, while the adult male individual and two of the infants were Creole. Therefore, the burial ground was probably used by both the captives at the depot and by the wider African and Afro-Caribbean population of the island. We show that even complex collections of partial remains are extremely important archives of information about the lives of past peoples for whom historical evidence is often sparse. N.B. A plain language summary is available at the end of the article.