Warfare on three continents, empire building, and revolution--political, agricultural, and industrial--dominate 18th-century world history. In Europe royal dynasties formed, fought major wars that carved up the map of Europe and the Americas, and began the great colonial expansion that dominated the next century. But the 18th century also ushered in the Enlightenment, which fired the imagination of Europeans, and the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions, which changed society and work forever. To help students better understand the major developments of the 18th century and their impact...

Intimately tied to the tenets of the Enlightenment, Romanticism arose as a sort of reaction to that trend, most noticeably in the arts. The movement, which originated in Europe in the late 18th century and lasted until the mid- 19th century, focused on emotion, imagination, an attachment to nature, nostalgia, and spirituality. The art, music and literature produced by that period have been some of history's most influential, and the tenets of the movement spilled over into politics, especially in nationalistic causes. This accessibly written volume is rounded out by primary source...

In this "readable and humane book" (Los Angeles Times Book Review), the late historian Roy Porter traces the course of man's philosophical journey from the superstitious, spiritually obsessed Dark Ages to our modern perspective, based on reason and grounded in the body. He demonstrates how the explosion of rational thought and scientific innovation during the Enlightenment began to change our understanding of the flesh and its relation to the soul. No longer simply a "mortal coil," the body eventually became the location, and source, of our conscious selves. Porter examines this...

The book argues that the most fundamental inspiration for the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers from Copernicus to Newton had created a magisterial science of nature based on the realization that the physical world operated...

In the late 1770s, as a wave of revolution and republican unrest swept across Europe, scholars looked with urgency on the progress of European civilization. The question of social development was addressed from Edinburgh to St. Petersburg, with German scholars, including C. G. Heyne, Christoph Meiners, and J. G. Eichhorn, at the center of the discussion.

Michael Carhart examines their approaches to understanding human development by investigating the invention of a new analytic category, "culture." In an effort to define human nature and culture, scholars analyzed ancient texts for...

Historians have generally come to accept the idea of a -long eighteenth century, - one that extended from circa 1660 to 1830. In The Global Eighteenth Century, editor Felicity Nussbaum and the contributing authors take this idea one step further, positing an eighteenth century that is -wide- as well as long, reaching beyond Europe into the African diaspora, the Americas, the Levant, China, India, and Oceania. Showcasing the work of twenty-one leading scholars in literature, world history, art history, geography, and environmental studies, this collection of essays explores both the...

Historians have generally come to accept the idea of a -long eighteenth century, - one that extended from circa 1660 to 1830. In The Global Eighteenth Century, editor Felicity Nussbaum and the contributing authors take this idea one step further, positing an eighteenth century that is -wide- as well as long, reaching beyond Europe into the African diaspora, the Americas, the Levant, China, India, and Oceania. Showcasing the work of twenty-one leading scholars in literature, world history, art history, geography, and environmental studies, this collection of essays explores both the...

Rediker introduces us to the dreaded black flag, the Jolly Roger; swashbuckling figures such as Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard; and the unnamed, unlimbed pirate who was likely Robert Louis Stevenson's model for Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

This history shows from the bottom up how sailors emerged from deadly working conditions on merchant and naval ships, turned pirate, and created a...