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For many years scholars have sought to explain why the European states which emerged in the period before the French Revolution developed along such different lines. Why did some become absolutist and others constitutionalist? What enabled some to develop bureaucratic administrative systems, while others remained dependent upon patrimonial practices? This book presents a new theory of state-building in medieval and early modern Europe. Ertman argues that two factors - the organisation of local government at the time of state formation and the timing of sustained geo-military competition - can explain most of the variation in political regimes and in state infrastructures found across the continent during the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawing on insights developed in historical sociology, comparative politics, and economic history, this book makes a compelling case for the value of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of political development.
Long before the guillotines of the 1789 Revolution brought a grisly political end to the ancien régime, Jay Caplan argues, the culture of absolutism had already perished. In the King's Wake traces the emergence of a post-absolutist culture across a wide range of works and genres: Saint-Simon's memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency; Voltaire's first tragedy, Oedipe; Watteau's last great painting, L'Enseigne de Gersaint; the plays of Marivaux; and Casanova's History of My Life. While absolutist culture had focused on value directly represented in people (e.g., those of noble blood) and things (e.g., coins made of precious metals), post-absolutist culture instead explored the capacity of signs to stand for something real (e.g., John Law's banknotes or Marivaux's plays in which actions rather than birth signify nobility). Between the image of the Sun King and visions of the godlike Romantic self, Caplan discovers a post-absolutist France wracked by surprisingly modern conflicts over the true sources of value and legitimacy.
The first historical overview of the partnership between science and the state from the Scientific Revolution to World War II.
This controversial study takes the provocative line that the French monarchy was a complete success. James turns the idea of royal ‘absolutism’ on its head by redefining the French monarchy’s success from 1598 - 1661. The Origins of French Absolutism, 1598-1661 maintains that building blocks were not being laid by the so-called architects of absolutism, but that by satisfying long-established, traditional ambitions, cardinal ministers Richelieu and Mazarin undoubtedly made the confident, ambitious reign of the late century possible.
The reading public outside Sweden knows little of that country's history, beyond the dramatic and short-lived era in the seventeenth century when Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus became a major European power by her intervention in the Thirty Years War. In the last decades of the seventeenth century another Swedish king, Charles XI, launched a less dramatic but remarkable bid to stabilize and secure Sweden's position as a major power in northern Europe and as master of the Baltic Sea. This project, which is almost unknown to students of history outside Sweden, involved a comprehensive overhaul of the government and institutions of the kingdom, on the basis of establishing Sweden as a model of absolute monarchy. This 1998 book gives an account of what was achieved under the absolutist direction of a distinctly unglamorous, but pious and conscientious ruler.
This book brings together an international team of scholars from Britain, France and North America to examine the causes of the breakdown of the absolute monarchy in eighteenth-century France and offers a new interpretation of the origins of the Revolution of 1789.
Discussions of the Arab world, particularly the Gulf States, increasingly focus on sectarianism and autocratic rule. These features are often attributed to the dominance of monarchs, Islamists, oil, and ‘ancient hatreds’. To understand their rise, however, one has to turn to a largely forgotten but decisive episode with far-reaching repercussions – Bahrain under British colonial rule in the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined Arabic literature as well as British archives, Omar AlShehabi details how sectarianism emerged as a modern phenomenon in Bahrain. He shows how absolutist rule was born in the Gulf, under the tutelage of the British Raj, to counter nationalist and anti-colonial movements tied to the al-Nahda renaissance in the wider Arab world. A groundbreaking work, Contested Modernity challenges us to reconsider not only how we see the Gulf but the Middle East as a whole.
Forty years after its original publication, Lineages of the Absolutist State remains an exemplary achievement in comparative history. Picking up from where its companion volume, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, left off, Lineages traces the development of Absolutist states in the early modern period from their roots in European feudalism, and assesses their various trajectories. Why didn't Italy develop into an Absolutist state in the same, indigenous way as the other dominant Western countries, namely Spain, France and England? On the other hand, how did Eastern European countries develop into Absolutist states similar to those of the West, when their social conditions diverged so drastically? Reflecting on examples in Islamic and East Asian history, as well as the Ottoman Empire, Anderson concludes by elucidating the particular role of European development within universal history.
The period of court absolutism and early capitalism extended from the end of the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. A new world view was created, along with a new type of individual possessing new economic orientations to the marketplace and new social attitudes deriving from such concerns. The unified political and religious world of medieval Europe broke into parts: national differentiation and religious options abounded. The autonomy of the nation-state created a need for new attitudes toward religious minorities, even despised ones such as the Jews. The court Jew phenomenon, as Selma Stern details, was inextricably linked to these larger developments, including the emancipation of Jews as a whole. Dr. Stern's work is an effort to reconstruct this unusual group of Jews who became politically and economically influential and through that mechanism were able to enhance Jewish community life as a whole. In his very existence the court Jew necessarily enlarged, beyond its original meaning, the concept of free expression in European societies. As the dominating idea of defending one church and one emperor collapsed under the weight of the new European system of power balances, a new conception of the Jew developed, one of a transforming agent in economic and political positions. With trade no longer condemned as sinful, collecting interest for loans no longer prohibited, and the merchant no longe'r compared to a thief, the Jewish money changer and tradesman came to be viewed in a more favorable light. In this new environment, the claims of Christianity remained supreme, but the rights of religious minorities were considered. At the time of the book's initial appearance, the Saturday Review hailed it as a "picturesque work giving evidence of great writing talent." The reviewer went on to note that "Dr. Stern's work provided exhaustive historical background of European Jewry—from 1650 to 1750—that period during which the modern European genius emerged." Dr. Stern's work relies heavily upon European archives up to 1938, when the advances of Nazism made further work impossible. As a result, what was started in Europe was completed in America.