A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Age of Enlightenment

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This fourth volume explores the intersections and transformations of empire in the late 17th and 18th centuries: an age of Enlightenment understood here both as a product of these new forces and as a matrix shaping their emergence and development. As innovative ideas transformed warfare, commerce and agriculture, the great universal empires confronted new capitalist forces that both splintered and reinforced imperial relations across the globe. Dutch, English and French trading companies backed by state power increasingly overtook the imperial ascendency of Spain and Portugal, while Ottoman and Russian territorial expansion slowed or halted. Commodities and capital circulated in new ways, along with people and ideas, yet that mobility was hardly a free exchange. The new forces found their first great expression in the global trade in human labour that transformed communities, environments and social relations in Europe, Africa and the Americas. Above all, A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Age of Enlightenment reveals the profound imprint left by the Atlantic slave trade on global conceptions of race, sexuality and power, and the burgeoning imperial rivalry, resentment and resistance that contributed to the explosion of revolutionary change at the end of the 18th century.

Reviews

Each volume could successfully stand alone as a reference work on an era: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Empire, and the Modern Age ... The introductory essay to each is a valuable resource for comparing traditional political and economic histories with the more critical and cultural works presented in subsequent chapters. Accompanying each volume is a list of illustrations, notes, further reading, and an index ... Overall, students seeking a comparative, interdisciplinary, and compelling account of the spread of Western empires will find much of interest here. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty * CHOICE *

Author Bio

Ian Coller is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He is the author of Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831 (2010) winner of the Australian Historical Associations W.K. Hancock award, and Muslims and Citizens: Islam, Politics and the French Revolution (2020).