The Inner Life of Empires An Eighteenth Century History 1st Edition by Emma Rothschild ISBN 978-0691148953 0691148953
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Product details:
ISBN 10: 0691148953
ISBN 13: 978-0691148953
Author: Emma Rothschild
The birth of the modern world as told through the remarkable story of one eighteenth-century family
They were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of empire. And they were from one family. The Inner Life of Empires tells the intimate history of the Johnstones–four sisters and seven brothers who lived in Scotland and around the globe in the fast-changing eighteenth century. Piecing together their voyages, marriages, debts, and lawsuits, and examining their ideas, sentiments, and values, renowned historian Emma Rothschild illuminates a tumultuous period that created the modern economy, the British Empire, and the philosophical Enlightenment.
One of the sisters joined a rebel army, was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, and escaped in disguise in 1746. Her younger brother was a close friend of Adam Smith and David Hume. Another brother was fluent in Persian and Bengali, and married to a celebrated poet. He was the owner of a slave known only as “Bell or Belinda,” who journeyed from Calcutta to Virginia, was accused in Scotland of infanticide, and was the last person judged to be a slave by a court in the British isles. In Grenada, India, Jamaica, and Florida, the Johnstones embodied the connections between European, American, and Asian empires. Their family history offers insights into a time when distinctions between the public and private, home and overseas, and slavery and servitude were in constant flux.
Based on multiple archives, documents, and letters, The Inner Life of Empires looks at one family’s complex story to describe the origins of the modern political, economic, and intellectual world.
Table of contents:
Chapter One: Setting Out
The Johnstone siblings were born in 18th-century Scotland and lived through global transformations—economic, political, and intellectual—shaped by empire and revolution.
Chapter Two: Coming Home
After years abroad, the Johnstones returned to England in 1766 during their most prosperous period, encountering both opportunity and loss.
Chapter Three: Ending and Loss
This chapter covers personal and familial decline, legal cases involving enslavement, and the aging and deaths of family members.
Chapter Four: Economic Lives
The Johnstones were entrepreneurial and deeply embedded in the economic systems of empire, using family networks and private knowledge to build their fortunes.
Chapter Five: Experiences of Empire
Their story illustrates how personal lives and imperial ambitions intertwined—often chaotically—across the Atlantic and East Indian worlds.
Chapter Six: What Is Enlightenment?
While not philosophers themselves, the Johnstones engaged with Enlightenment ideas through their writings and social connections, especially in Edinburgh.
Chapter Seven: Histories of Sentiments
A study of how the Johnstones experienced and expressed emotion, particularly in legal and familial contexts, reflecting both public and private dimensions.
Chapter Eight: Other People
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