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| Eighteenth-Century Studies | |
|---|---|
| Name | Eighteenth-Century Studies |
| Period | 18th century |
| Start | 1701 |
| End | 1800 |
| Regions | Europe, North America, Caribbean, Asia |
| Notable figures | Adam Smith, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Denis Diderot |
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Eighteenth-Century Studies surveys the culture of the 1700s through interdisciplinary analysis of texts, institutions, and events, connecting figures such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, David Hume, Samuel Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft with developments associated with the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the expansion of empires including the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, and the Dutch Empire; the field draws on archives from institutions like the British Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Library of Congress, the Bodleian Library, and the Vatican Library to examine poetry by Alexander Pope, satire by Jonathan Swift, novels by Daniel Defoe, plays by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, periodicals such as the Gentleman's Magazine, and legal texts like the Treaty of Paris (1763).
Scholars situate the century between events such as the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War, the American Revolutionary War, and the French Revolutionary Wars while tracing continuities from the Glorious Revolution to the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna, engaging debates about periodization advanced by historians like G.M. Trevelyan, E.P. Thompson, Simon Schama, Johan Huizinga, and Fernand Braudel and consulting primary documents from royal archives such as the Cabinet Office (United Kingdom), the Archives Nationales (France), and the National Archives and Records Administration.
Literary studies foreground interactions among authors and institutions—Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Fanny Burney, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft—while art historians analyze painters like William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Antoine Watteau alongside theatrical figures such as David Garrick and opera composers like George Frideric Handel using collections at the National Gallery (London), the Louvre, the Uffizi, and the Hermitage Museum and periodicals including the Spectator (1711–1712) and the Edinburgh Review.
Analysis treats the circulation of ideas among pamphleteers, salons, and parliaments, linking thinkers Montesquieu, Voltaire, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Cesare Beccaria, and Baron d'Holbach to institutions such as the Académie française, the Royal Society, the East India Company, and legislatures including the Parliament of Great Britain and the Estates-General of 1789 as well as to legislative outcomes like the United States Constitution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the Bill of Rights 1689, and legal reforms exemplified by the Code Napoléon.
Studies examine class formations, labor systems, and commercial networks involving actors like the South Sea Company, planters in the Caribbean, merchants of Lisbon, and financiers in Amsterdam and London, and consider institutions and events such as the Transatlantic slave trade, the Haitian Revolution, the Enclosure Acts, the Gin Act, the Price Revolution, and the rise of industrial centers like Manchester and Birmingham alongside demographic sources from parish registers, census data, and reports from the Bank of England.
Research connects practitioners and institutions including Isaac Newton's legacy at the University of Cambridge, the work of Antoine Lavoisier, experiments by Benjamin Franklin, botanical collections of Carl Linnaeus, anatomical studies in the Royal College of Physicians, and inventions showcased by early industrialists such as James Watt and Richard Arkwright, while tracing responses to medical crises through writings by Edward Jenner and public health measures documented in municipal records and the proceedings of the Royal Society.
Contemporary scholarship links eighteenth-century print culture, legal reform, and visual arts to later movements studied by critics like Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Quentin Skinner, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Benedict Anderson, informing debates in cultural history, postcolonial studies, and reception studies at universities such as University of Oxford, Harvard University, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Yale University, University of Cambridge, and institutions like the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association; archival projects and digital humanities initiatives hosted by the British Library and the National Archives (UK) continue to reshape access to manuscripts and printed ephemera from the century.
Category:18th century studies