Iran and a French Empire of Trade, 1700-1808 PDF Download

Author: Junko Thérèse Takeda
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781789622256
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Iran and a French Empire of Trade examines the understudied topic of Franco-Persian relations in the long eighteenth century to highlight how rising tensions among Eurasian empires and revolutions in the Atlantic world were profoundly intertwined. Conflicts between Persia, Turkey, India and Russia, and European weapons-dealing with these empires occurred against a backdrop of climate change and food insecurities that destabilized markets. Takeda shows how the French state relied on "entrepreneurial imperialism" to extend commercial activities eastwards beyond the Mediterranean during this time, from Louis XIV's reign to Napoleon Bonaparte's First Empire. Organized as a collection of microhistories, her study showcases a colourful set of characters--rogue merchants from Marseille, a gambling house madam, a naturalized Greek-French drogman, and a bi-cultural Genevan-Persian consul, among others--to demonstrate how individuals on the fringes of French society spearheaded projects to foster ties between France and Persia. Considering the Enlightenment as a product of a connected world, Takeda investigates how trans-imperial adventurers, merchants, consuls, and informants negotiated treaties, traded commodities and arms, transferred knowledge, and introduced industrial practices from Asia to Europe. And she shows the surprising ways in which Enlightenment debates about regime changes from the Safavid to Qajar dynasties and Persia's borderland wars shaped French ideas about revolution andpolicies related to empire-building.

Author: Julia Caterina Hartley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755645618
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
New translations of Persian literature into French, the invention of the Aryan myth, increased travel between France and Iran, and the unveiling of artefacts from ancient Susa at the Louvre Museum are among the factors that radically altered France's perception of Iran during the long nineteenth century. And this is reflected in the literary culture of the period. In an ambitious study spanning poetry, historiography, fiction, travel-writing, ballet, opera, and marionette theatre, Julia Hartley reveals the unique place that Iran held in the French literary imagination between 1829 and 1912. Iran's history and culture remained a constant source of inspiration across different generations and artistic movements, from the 'Oriental' poems of Victor Hugo to those of Anna de Noailles and Théophile Gautier's strategic citation of Persian poetry to his daughter Judith Gautier's full-blown rewriting of a Persian epic. Writing about Iran could also serve to articulate new visions of world history and religion, as was the case in the intellectual debates that took place between Michelet, Renan, and Al-Afghani. Alternatively joyous, as in Félicien David's opera Lalla Roukh, and ominous, as in Massenet's Le Mage, Iran elicited a multiplicity of treatments. This is most obvious in the travelogues of Flandin, Gobineau, Loti, Jane Dieulafoy, and Marthe Bibesco, which describe the same cities and cultural practices in altogether different ways. Under these writers' pens, Iran emerges as both an Oriental other and an alter ego, its culture elevated above that of all other Muslim nations. At times this led French writers to critique notions of European superiority. But at others, they appropriated Iran as proto-European through racialist narratives that reinforced Orientalist stereotypes. Drawing on theories of Orientalism and cultural difference, this book navigates both sides of this fascinating and complex literary history. It is the first major study on the subject.

Author: Susan Mokhberi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190884797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Persian Mirror explores France's preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu's Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle of the Persian ambassador's visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.

Author: Trevor Burnard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197622607
Category : Seven Years' War, 1756-1763
Languages : en
Pages : 785

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Book Description
"This handbook contains 38 essays that provide up-to-date scholarship on all aspects of the globally important Seven Years' War (1756-1763). The volume carefully examines the three major areas of conflict in the war-Europe, South Asia, and the Americas-treating each theater as distinct from each other but often linked in ways that helped create a new geopolitics from the 1760s onward. Chapters trace the causes of the war in the interior of America; outline the triumphs of Britain and Prussia in fierce fighting across Europe; and explain how the British under the East India Company came to play an important role in South Asian politics and commerce. The handbook pays due attention to military conflict but does much more than this. It investigates social, cultural, and intellectual developments in a crucial period of reorientation during the mid-eighteenth century. The handbook is notably diverse in its authorship, with leading scholars on the Seven Years' War from Europe and South Asia as well as Britain and North America, providing perspectives from many areas outside an Anglo-American frame. It treats the Seven Years' War as a world-transformative event: important not only in its own right-in shaping commerce, politics, science, art, demography, religion, and gender during the conflict-but also central to the evolving history of South Asia, Europe, and the Americas in the second half of the eighteenth century"--

Author: Paul David Buell
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004432108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Crossroads of Cuisine offers history of food and cultural exchanges in and around Central Asia. It discusses geographical base, and offers historical and cultural overview. A photo essay binds it all together. The book offers new views of the past.

Author: Mark Ingram
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800738218
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Formerly the gateway to the French empire, the city of Marseille exemplifies a postcolonial Europe reshaped by immigrants, refugees, and repatriates. The Marseille Mosaic addresses the city’s past and present, exploring the relationship between Marseille and the rest of France, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Proposing new models for the study of place by integrating approaches from the humanities and social sciences, this volume offers an idiosyncratic “mosaic,” which vividly details the challenges facing other French and European cities and the ways residents are developing alternative perspectives and charting new urban futures.

Author: Susan E. Schopp
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888528505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Sino-French Trade at Canton, 1698–1842 presents a rare and lively view of the French experience at Canton, and calls for a reappraisal of France’s role in that trade. France was one of the two most important Western powers in the eighteenth century, and was home to one of the three major European East India companies. Yet the nation is woefully underrepresented in Canton trade scholarship. Susan E. Schopp rescues the French from the sidelines, showing that they exerted a presence that, though closely watched by their rivals, is today largely unrecognized. Their contributions were diverse, ranging from finding new sea routes to inspiring the renovation of hong façades. Consequently, to ignore the French, or to dismiss them as simply “also-rans,” results in a skewed perception of the Canton system. Schopp also demonstrates that while the most distinctive aspect of the French model of company trade was the dominant role of the state—indeed, the French East India Company has been memorably described as a “Versailles of trade”—this did not rule out a place for legitimate, and sometimes surprising, participation by the private sector. On the contrary: France’s commercial relations with China were inaugurated by private traders, and the popularity of the Canton trade spurred the eventual demise of the company model. Backed up by extensive archival work, Schopp’s work demonstrates a remarkable understanding of the Sino-European trade, and her book reveals an unparalleled passion for the role of seamanship in history. “It is shocking how little has been written in any language about French trade in China, so this excellent book fills a tremendous need. It has the potential to become a classic monograph of lasting significance: an outstanding work that will make a strong imprint on the historiography.” —Tonio Andrade, Emory University “Schopp’s valuable study shows that the French ought not to be considered ‘also-rans’ in European trade with China. The French way was, in fact, a ‘distinctive model’ of European trade with China, one different from that of the better-known English East India Company. The author’s comprehensive research takes the reader into the material history of the French trading vessels, the hong, and the personnel involved in the trade.” —Robert Aldrich, University of Sydney

Author: Cross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197653758
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
In the wake of the Seven Years' War and the consolidation of British power on the subcontinent, the French monarchy chartered a new East India Company. The Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes was an attempt to maintain French diplomatic and financial credit among European rivals and trading partners within a region integral to the broader imperial economy. Reimagining French power as subsisting through an informal empire of trade, instead of a territorial empire of conquest, officials and intellectuals sought to remake the trading company as a private, "purely commercial" actor, rather than a sovereign company-state. Company Politics offers a new interpretation of political economy, imperialism, and the history of the corporation during the late Old Regime and the French Revolution. Despite its reputation for speculation, corruption, and scandal, Elizabeth Cross argues that the "New Company" emerged from the unique circumstances France faced in India as a weakened imperial power vis à vis the expanding British East India Company. Seeking to control the Company for their own purposes, French government officials, theorists, and private financial actors clashed over differing notions of political economy, debt, and imperial power for Europe and the Indian Ocean world. In doing so, they envisioned new alignments between state and market, challenged the legitimacy of the Old Regime's economic and imperial policies, and sought to revolutionize the underlying corporation itself through progressive demands of corporate self-governance. Thus, the New Company should be seen as an innovative capitalist actor in its own right, not a mere derivative of its Anglo-Dutch competitors. A valuable contribution to scholarship on capitalism, empire, and globalization, Company Politics uses the Company's history to present the Revolutionary Era as one of dynamic economic ideologies, practices, and experimentation, rather than only one of crisis and decline.

Author: Meredith Martin
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606067303
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This richly illustrated volume, the first devoted to maritime art and galley slavery in early modern France, shows how royal propagandists used the image and labor of enslaved Muslims to glorify Louis XIV. Mediterranean maritime art and the forced labor on which it depended were fundamental to the politics and propaganda of France’s King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715). Yet most studies of French art in this period focus on Paris and Versailles, overlooking the presence or portrayal of galley slaves on the kingdom’s coasts. By examining a wide range of artistic productions—ship design, artillery sculpture, medals, paintings, and prints—Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss uncover a vital aspect of royal representation and unsettle a standard picture of art and power in early modern France. With an abundant selection of startling images, many never before published, The Sun King at Sea emphasizes the role of esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks)—rowers who were captured or purchased from Islamic lands—in building and decorating ships and other art objects that circulated on land and by sea to glorify the Crown. Challenging the notion that human bondage vanished from continental France, this cross-disciplinary volume invites a reassessment of servitude as a visible condition, mode of representation, and symbol of sovereignty during Louis XIV’s reign.

Author: Frank Trentmann
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241198402
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 682

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Book Description
The epic history of consumption, and the goods that have transformed our lives over the past 600 years What we consume has become the defining feature of our lives: our economies live or die by spending, we are treated more as consumers than workers, and even public services are presented to us as products in a supermarket. In this monumental study, acclaimed historian Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary history that has shaped our material world, from late Ming China, Renaissance Italy and the British Empire to the present. Astonishingly wide-ranging and richly detailed, Empire of Things explores how we have come to live with so much more, how this changed the course of history, and the global challenges we face as a result.