Late Eighteenth Century Research Articles

Voltaire’s Breadfruit

The British Government-facilitated introduction of breadfruit trees (Artocarpus altilis) from the Pacific to the Caribbean during the late eighteenth century was a notable feat of economic botany, but the identities of the earliest originators of the idea remain unclear. Previous historical scholarship has focused mainly upon the role of Joseph Banks as the prime mover behind the scheme, while more investigative scholarship has identified one of Banks’s correspondents, Valentine Morris, as having made an early suggestion of the idea in writing. This focus on Banks and Morris, however, may have overlooked or understudied even earlier origins of the idea. After discussing several key individuals involved in the inception of the breadfruit project, this article then considers a series of passages on breadfruit in the writings of Voltaire and presents a hypothetical pathway by which those involved in the actual transfer of breadfruit from the Pacific to the Caribbean, including Banks via Morris, may have been influenced by the French philosopher.

Globalisation Occurred in Loch Craignish in 1720

The arrival of a pirate ship in Loch Craignish in 1720 was an episodic occurrence, which introduced a local community in Argyllshire to the process of globalisation, a process marked by the transoceanic movements of people, goods and ideas. For literate Scots, the wider horizons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were opened up by novels, travel literature and newsprint. While reading material stimulated the mind and promoted discussion about matters of global interest, actual commodities from overseas variously engaged all the senses. Globalisation became an active rather than a passive experience. Sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste affected all, from the social, commercial and intellectual elites to the woman in the field and the man in the street in early modern Scotland. Nevertheless, public knowledge of where colonial commodities came from became distanced by time. A global awareness of place was retained in families and communities overtly engaged in mercantile and military adventuring, especially when accompanied by death whether through natural causes, misadventure or mortal combat. Illicit activities had a no less profound impact. Indeed, covert people trafficking, enslavement, smuggling, shipwrecking and piracy had a more local immediacy.

Anglo–Dutch financial connections and contrasts in the late eighteenth century: The Amsterdam phase of the 1772–3 credit crisis

AbstractWe examine the Amsterdam phase of the 1772–3 financial crisis using the British experience in the same episode as comparative context. We conclude that, notwithstanding some direct exposures by Amsterdam institutions to the principals of the London crisis, the main linkage between the two outbreaks was the requirement for cash margin on loans backed by British East India Company shares. No significant contagion via the bills of exchange network spread from London to Amsterdam in the period separating the two outbreaks, but some feeding back of distress to London is noticeable after the Dutch outbreak. The crisis was rooted in credit expansion, a deterioration in asset risk profiles, and speculation in West Indian mortgage securities and British equity markets. Speculators were enabled by information inefficiencies in the specialized and layered Amsterdam markets, and by the absence of a gatekeeper who could have regulated the provision of credit to them. To contain the outbreak, the Dutch drew on the cohesion of an informal club of insiders who led business and civic affairs. Though the credit markets resumed normal operations relatively quickly, the incurred losses were transformative for their long term prospects by devastating some of their most important firms.

Subversive Submersives

The enormity of the ocean presents as an unusual physical obstacle that complicates claims for spaces being urbanised well beyond the traditional container of the city, such as the focus of this discussion: the Southern Ocean. Though commonly perceived as a pristine wilderness at the end of the earth, the ocean surrounding Antarctica has been imbricated in planetary-scale processes of urbanisation since the late eighteenth century, so the absence of this oceanic volume from twenty-first-century urban debates is troubling. Representations of the Antarctic as remote and disconnected from cities do nothing to contribute to a critical discussion of its ocean volume, technological histories or ongoing colonial settler imaginaries. Instead, attention might turn to codifying what the ocean increasingly contains by way of urban processes and, ultimately, what might be offered by confirming extended forms of urbanisation operating on and, importantly, through the earth. In this article I re-present the Southern Ocean via comparative cartographies and critical image-making to cross-examine what its occlusion signifies for the planetary reach of urbanisation. For underneath the machinery of extraction and exploitation lie significant questions regarding representations of the urban as they manifest outside conventions that overstate ‘the city’ as central to urbanisation.

Enlightenment and Exchange

This essay explores a link made in the late eighteenth century between social critique and economic progress. At the intersection of enlightenment and capitalist exchange a series of assumptions about social development and social tutelage are made. While national development driven by exchange was understood to homogenize people, and peoples, over time, I argue that this homogenizing effect depended on a constant application of economic tutelage. According to Adam Smith the propensity to exchange is a universal human attribute driving economic progress, but in practice the adoption of technical change could not be guaranteed by the propensity to exchange alone. As both Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth recognized, the implication was clear: without critique of old technical forms, no general increase in wealth. A tutor specifying the appropriate stance toward technical progress was forever needed. The form of enlightenment that was good for individuals, to think for yourself, was thus not extended to social groups in the economic realm.

Designing Truth between Manuscript and Publication: The Eighteenth-Century French Vision of Peru in Marmontel’s Les Incas (1777)

This essay interrogates the tensions between historical fact and colonial fiction in Jean-François Marmontel’s Les Incas, ou le destruction de l’Empire du Pérou (1777). Through this study of deleted passages and publisher notes in the 1776 manuscript of the novel (Houghton Library, Harvard University), Marmontel’s concern with verisimilitude, truth, and objective reality belies the fantasy of conquest and the myths of American Indigeneity that are central to eighteenth-century French understandings and imaginings of the Inca Empire and the American continent as a whole. Politically, the novel served a dual purpose: to vehemently denounce the Spanish conquest of the Americas and to subversively critique the “fanaticism” of the ancien régime in the years leading up the 1789 Revolution. Across the Atlantic, the novel was read by generals of the Latin American Wars of Independence, and it shifted from an allegorical text to a direct call for revolution. Despite Marmontel’s aim of creating a philosophical and historical novel, Les Incas perpetuates the hegemonies and hierarchies of colonialism, falling back onto well-established tropes. In choosing what was considered in Europe as “exotic” as a vehicle for political critique, Les Incas maintains and reinforces the very systems against which the revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century fought.

Етноісторичні мотиви (сюжети) в музичному мистецтві України другої половини 18 – початку 19 століття

The purpose of the article is to study ethno-historical motifs in the musical art of Ukraine in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a special emphasis on folk art and its influence on the development of orchestral, choral and individual musical performances. The article examines the cultural and social changes of this era and their impact on the evolution of kobza and bandura art, which served not only as a means of musical expression but also as an important element of preserving national identity and historical memory. The article describes in detail the ethno-historical motifs that were manifested through musical art, reflecting social moods, historical events and the heroic past of the nation. Considerable attention is paid to the analysis of the interaction of folk traditions with professional art forms, revealing the richness and diversity of folk art of that time. The research methodology is based on an integrated approach to the study of historical, musical and cultural aspects, using archival documents and scientific sources, which allows a comprehensive assessment of the influence of ethno-historical motifs on the formation of the cultural landscape of Ukraine in the period under study. Particular attention is paid to the role of kobzars and bandura players, who, by performing historical and contemporary themes, contributed to the preservation of national identity and the reproduction of cultural heritage. The scientific novelty of the study lies in an in-depth analysis of the contribution of musical groups and individual performers to the development of the region’s art, with an emphasis on their interaction with folk traditions and professional music in the context of historical and cultural processes. Conclusions. The emphasise the importance of studying ethno-historical motifs in the musical art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as key elements in the formation of Ukraine’s cultural identity, pointing to the need for further research in this area to better understand the role of musical art in the contemporary cultural context.

Geopolitics of mobile masses: refugee and tourist metaphors in Finnish-Russian bordertown media

This paper examines the discourses on mobile others as objects of massification or likened to natural forces. By creating a dialogue between theories of crowds/masses and popular geopolitics, we examine how a local media frames the actual, imagined and absent border crossings of refugees and tourists when a voluminous mobile group disappears in tandem with an emerging unease about a new mobile group. We focus on the freesheet Imatralainen, published in a South Karelian Finnish-Russian bordertown that has been a tourist destination since the late eighteenth century but where invisible geopolitical tension is part of everyday life. Our discourse analysis shows that from the Crimean crisis to the migrant ‘crisis’ (2014–2016), local media have frequently portrayed Russian tourists and non-European migrants via a natural force rhetoric while viewing both refugees and tourists as potential resources or burdens. The mobility of others can represent itself as an external threat, and it can be taken as a perspectival threatscape that opens space for geopolitical issues amplified or transformed through the idea of masses and crowds into potential local issues. The article contributes to tourism geographies and the geopolitics of mobilities literature by evaluating the potential of classical crowd theories for understanding how threatscapes relating to the refugee-tourist nexus are made and manipulated by linguistic collectivisation, silencing and dehumanisation. We argue that more attention should be given to the role of the local in shaping the popular geopolitics of mobilities that construct, sustain and fabricate discourses of ‘otherness’ and massification.

Literary Condemnation of the Slave Trade and Wealth as the Cause of Corruption Represented in the Light of English Literature

This article has illustrated how, within the framework of English literature, the slave trade and money are both literarily condemned as the root causes of corruption. When the slave trade was prohibited in the British Empire in 1807, the idea of equating labourers with slaves was highly controversial. That had happened very swiftly after a campaign that had only really begun 20 years before. Both slavery and the trade in Africans have already been condemned on occasion and in literature. The social objective of imitating the great landed nobility was examined and criticised by Adam Smith. The literature of the eighteenth century was also afflicted by the contradiction between the social and moral hierarchy. It is significantly more focused on the landed classes than the corporate sector, even though it is sometimes considered a bourgeois art form. Contrary to popular belief, writers of the late eighteenth century did not promote bourgeois principles in opposition to those of the aristocracy. Conversely, in the last decades of the century, they favoured a rural way of life and resisted urbanisation. They tended to side with the underclass against their new rulers, the industrial bourgeoisie, in the class struggle that industrialization sparked.

The Intellectual World of Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Genius

Abstract: This article examines the life and work of Phillis Wheatley and her interlocutors to consider how African-descended people conceptualized liberty and formed an intellectual community during the American Revolution. Her poetry and epistolary exchanges, shared with a range of acquaintances in the Atlantic World, reveal an intellectual universe that she created for herself and one that drew her into the political spotlight. Leaders of the founding generation began to question the intellectual possibilities for an African girl in ways that held political implications for the future of slavery. I argue that Wheatley's life and work opens critical avenues for exploring intellectualism as an aspiration of Black life in early America, and that her world of ideas sheds light on the possibilities of Black girlhood in the late eighteenth century.

To Press, Dry, Organise, and Represent

Abstract This paper examines the epistemological relation between two types of scientific image produced during a botanical expedition to New Granada in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: herbarium sheets and botanical illustration. Visual analysis of an exceptional collection of these two types of documents brings to light how scientific ideologies were transferred from Europe to New Granada, during the transformation of this latter from a colony to a republic. This study shows how features such as composition, proportion, and pictorial technique derive from both aesthetic choices and epistemological necessities. It reveals the development of a codified visual language resulting from a highly organised and structured outcome, complying with Carl Linnaeus’ principles of classification, and materialising a new way of looking at plants based on Isaac Newton’s universal mathematical principles.

The Letter‐Writing Manual and the Epistolary Novel

AbstractThe relationship between real and fictional letters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has been the source of much critical debate. Disagreement surrounds the extent to which the increasingly popular genre of the epistolary novel drew on the practices and techniques of actual correspondence. On the one hand are those who see epistolary fiction as developing out of real‐life letters, with some literary‐stylistic additions. On the other hand are those who reject this teleological approach in favour of one that emphasizes the functional versatility of the letter in the period, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of drawing a distinction between its real and fictional incarnations. This relationship between real correspondence and epistolary fiction is brought into sharp focus by the genre of the letter‐writing manual, which rose sharply in popularity from the last two decades of the seventeenth century onwards. Concentrating on John Hill's The Young Secretary's Guide (1689), Thomas Goodman's The Experience's Secretary (1699), and G. F.'s The Secretary's Guide (1705), in particular, in this article, I suggest that the style of the letter‐writing manual from this period can, with caution, be compared with that of the epistolary novel. I pay particular attention to the ways in which letters in these manuals respond to and quote from each other and the often subtle ways in which they thus incorporate different voices. This polyvocality is taken further in Samuel Richardson's manual Familiar Letters (1741), which, as is well known, provided the raw material for his first novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1741). I demonstrate that some of the stylistic techniques which would prove crucial to the great epistolary novels of the later eighteenth century, including Richardson's, can be found, at least in embryonic form, in the letter‐writing manuals of the Restoration period.

Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort: A Crisis of Class Identity

The late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries in Britain are characterised by socio-cultural and political turmoil and transformations specifically due to the impacts of the revolutions, the growth of the middle class and thus the changing class hierarchies. Within this chaotic socio-political atmosphere, the Gothic becomes a very dominant and popular genre projecting these transitions of this period. Joanna Baillie who is influenced by the Gothic craze of the age like many writers is regarded as one of the most significant playwrights of the period. In one of her well-known Gothic plays, De Monfort (1798), Baillie portrays the anxiety and fear of the loss of power and status by the aristocracy. Thus, she creates a Gothic atmosphere surrounded by claustrophobic and paranoid anxiety of De Monfort. De Monfort, who is also affected by fear and paranoia dominating the period as a result of the political sanctions, cannot adjust himself to the changing social structure. Considering the changing class hierarchies, particularly De Monfort’s attachment to his family name becomes the core of the play in terms of his fear of obliteration. In the context of the socio-cultural and political dynamics of the Romantic period, this study aims to argue how Baillie illustrates the shifting class dynamics and the anxieties of the period with reference to her Gothic play, De Monfort.

C. P. E. Bach, Haydn and the Evolving Keyboard Idioms of the Later Eighteenth Century

AbstractThe long careers of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Joseph Haydn coincided with fundamental transformations in how keyboard instruments were built and played and how composers wrote for them. Haydn's keyboard music probably saw the more profound changes in compositional style, yet C. P. E. Bach and others preceded him in discovering ways to incorporate new keyboard idioms into pieces written for new types of instruments. Bach gradually shifted from writing generic keyboard music to composing in idioms most appropriate to two-manual harpsichords, unfretted clavichords or fortepianos. Haydn likewise began writing in a generic idiom; many works that have been posited as having been meant for the clavichord cannot in fact be assigned clearly to that or any other specific instrument. Although Haydn did eventually turn to writing specifically for the fortepiano, he too made a gradual, and relatively late, transition from a generic approach to one that centred on the grand fortepianos of the late eighteenth century. Bach's influence on Haydn is inseparable from the matter of the keyboard instruments. Although the precise nature and extent of Bach's influence cannot be determined, compositional elements derived by Haydn from Bach's music range from superficial thematic and notational parallelisms to fundamental conceptions of what keyboard music could be or could express.

Beyond prometheanism: Modern technologies as strategies for redistributing time and space

Technologies developed since the late eighteenth century differ from earlier forms of technology by being as dependent on world market prices of labour, land and other biophysical resources as on human inventiveness. Yet, whether their outlook is mainstream or heterodox, modern people tend to view technology simply as ingenuity applied to nature, while oblivious of the extent to which it is contingent on the asymmetric exchange of resources in global society. Although inextricably entwined in the real world, the phenomena studied by economics and engineering are kept conceptually separate. This is achieved by disregarding the materiality of world trade. Modern technologies are not just instruments for solving problems but social strategies for redistributing time and space in world society, displacing work and environmental loads to sectors of the world system where wages are lower and environmental legislation less rigorous. Technology should not remain extraneous to social theory. A sociometabolic reconceptualisation of technology is particularly essential for critics of global capitalism.

Conjectures of British Investment, Tax Revenues, and Deficit Amounts from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth Century using the Concept of Economic Surplus

This article attempts to estimate trends in the levels of public and private investment, and national government surpluses and deficits from accumulated capital income, taxation, and rents estimated by different economic historians for England and the UK by utilizing the concept of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s economic surplus. The data support historical accounts that income per capita growth begins to increase around the 1600s in Britain, perhaps due to the level of capital, tax, and land income achieving an adequate threshold amount. According to some historians, this would also be about the time of capitalism’s ascent as the dominant economic system in Britain. Even then, dramatic increases in investment and economic growth do not appear until the late eighteenth century when investment and deficits reach even higher levels. The new estimates developed in this article are offered as additional macroeconomic data supplements to works created by other authors and researchers and submitted as a demonstration of the concept of economic surplus and the power of threshold levels of private and public investment. Most of all they also give some support to Baran and Sweezy’s notion of a society’s economic surplus coming from labor exploitation and being used to further investment and government expenditures.

The darkest field of medicine? The integration of psychological knowledge into medical education in the Habsburg Monarchy (1780s–1840s)

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on a specific aspect of the emergence of psychology and psychiatry as scientific disciplines in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It examines how psychological knowledge, which was scattered across different fields of knowledge such as philosophy and anthropology, as well as medical subfields such as physiology, pathology and state medicine, was filtered into medical education in three medical faculties of the Habsburg Monarchy: Vienna, Prague and Pest. As education was the primary arena of producing authoritative medical knowledge, the three institutions played a key role in the transfers of knowledge within the Monarchy and in shaping ‘official’ medical practices acknowledged by the state. These in turn could be used to validate different measures to normalize or optimize its population. Through the lens of education and the underlying tension between the different approaches to psychological knowledge that constituted a type of ‘arcane knowledge’ in the period, with fluid and often dubious boundaries and questionable applicability, the article points at the epistemological uncertainty and transitory nature of the psychological field. The paper also looks at how it was nevertheless integrated into medical education with varying success by the 1840s as part of the professionalization of psychiatry and with the pronounced aim of training specialists who could cooperate in creating functioning spaces for the mad where they could not only be kept, but also normalized and (re)integrated into society.

The fish collection of Jos Mariano da Conceio Veloso (17421811) and the beginning of ichthyological research in Brazil, with a taxonomic description of the extant specimens.

Two Portuguese institutions, the Museu Maynense da Academia das Cincias de Lisboa (ACL), and the Museu da Cincia da Universidade de Coimbra (MCUC), house a collection of 85 dried fish specimens prepared in what can be called a fish-herbaria following a process similar to that developed by the Dutch naturalist Johan Frederic Gronovius (16901762). These specimens date back to the late eighteenth century and represent Brazilian taxa. Previous authors assumed that they were part of the collections amassed by the Brazilian-Portuguese naturalist Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira (17561815) during his philosophical voyage to the Amazon. Here we present a review of these specimens, suggesting that they belonged to Friar Jos Mariano da Conceio Veloso (17421811) and describe the history of dispersal of these collections up the present day. A total of 58 species in 50 genera, 32 families and 19 orders are represented in the collection. Only 8.6% of these specimens represent freshwater species, while 91.4% are marine or brackish water species. The present known distribution of these taxa is focused on southwestern Brazil, which agrees with the area where Veloso collected natural history specimens. A good percentage of the species were undescribed at the time Veloso collected them, and had they been published by him, would have had priority over species described decades later by famous eighteenth and nineteenth century ichthyologists. We also present a brief discussion on the challenges and opportunities of studying historical natural history specimens, with special focus on those amassed during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by Brazilian-Portuguese naturalists.

Navigating “Race” at Tahiti: Polynesian and European Encounters

Abstract In this article I analyze stories about the negotiation of European racialization ideologies in the Society Islands (Tahiti and its Islands) in the late eighteenth century. My focus is the disjunctures between European understandings of their encounters at Tahiti, and what Pacific scholars have come to understand of Polynesian understandings of themselves and various foreigners in that early period. In doing so, I draw out the ways sexuality and gender mediated, enabled, and were also constituted through such racialization processes in their cultural and historical specificity. A key point of departure for this analysis is that the embodiment of race is a negotiated social process. The comparative historical case study I offer up here follows current scholarly moves in seeking out the insights to be gained by tracking racialization as a contingent process, as open rather than closed, as variegated rather than singular, and as imperfectly and only tenuously wrought through ideologies that may be profoundly unanticipated from the vantage point of modernist logics of essentialism and foundationalism. The resulting analysis aims to create space for critically revisiting the ways in which racial normativities and racialized embodiment operate, and how they work, and fail to work, to promote naturalized racist hierarchies of privilege and subordination.

The Remains of the Night

Several theories claim that the rhythms of daily life changed dramatically in the late eighteenth century, as a result of the advent of street lighting. New technologies made it possible to work longer hours, enjoy a dash of leisure time, or otherwise stay active during the evening. People thus slowly but surely ‘colonized’ the night. Drawing on new empirical data from the eyewitness accounts of the local criminal court in Antwerp, this article subjects this theory to a thorough investigation. The findings show that there was no real increase in nocturnalization because Antwerpers – even without new street lamps – remained active for a long time anyway. They usually continued working long after sunset or had time for leisure. Sleep was limited to the biological minimum. A deviant rhythm in which people remained active until the wee hours of the morning and only got up well after sunrise was reserved for a small group of people who belonged either to the absolute cream of the crop or to the fringes of society.