Showing titles in 18th Century

Mutiny on the Spanish Main tells the dramatic story of HMS Hermione, a British frigate which, in 1797, was the site of the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history, which saw the death of her captain and many of her officers. Though her crew handed her over to the Spanish, Hermione was subsequently recaptured in a daring raid on a Caribbean port two years later.

The first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas began in 1791 when thousands of brutally exploited slaves rose up against their masters on Saint-Domingue, the most profitable colony in the 18th-century Atlantic world. Within a few years, the slave insurgents forced the French administrators of the colony to emancipate them, a decision ratified by revolutionary Paris in 1794. This victory was a stunning challenge to the order of master/slave relations throughout the Americas, including the Southern United States.

The captivating biography of the French aristocrat who balanced the demands of her society with passionate affairs of the heart and a brilliant life of the mind. Although today she is best known for her fifteen-year liaison with Voltaire, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706-1749) was more than a great man's mistress. After marrying a marquis at the age of eighteen, she proceeded to fulfill the prescribed-and delightfully frivolous-role of a French noblewoman of her time.

One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world. Liberty and equality. Human rights. Freedom of thought and expression. Belief in reason and progress. The value of scientific inquiry. These are just some of the ideas that were conceived and developed during the Enlightenment, and which changed forever the intellectual landscape of the Western world.

On November 29, 1781, Captain Collingwood of the British ship Zong commanded his crew to throw overboard one-third of his cargo: a shipment of Africans bound for slavery in America. The captain believed his ship was off course, and he feared there was not enough drinking water to last until landfall. This book is the first to examine in detail the deplorable killings on the Zong, the lawsuit that ensued, how the murder of 132 slaves affected debates about slavery, and the way we remember the infamous Zong today.

In Regency England the eldest son usually inherited almost everything—while his younger brothers, left with little inheritance, had to make a crucial decision: What should they do to make an independent living? Historian Rory Muir weaves together the stories of many obscure and well-known young men of good family but small fortune, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Regency society. This is the first scholarly yet accessible exploration of the lifestyle and prospects of these younger sons.

The growth of piracy led to a major surge in attacks in the Caribbean and along North America’s Atlantic seaboard. With the fragile maritime economy of the Americas threatened with collapse, major ports were threatened and trade brought to a standstill, the British government finally declared war on the pirates. The Pirate Menace draws on extensive research, as well as a wide range of first-hand accounts, to produce a new history of the heyday of historical piracy.

After revolutions in America and France, a wave of tumult coursed the globe from 1790 to 1850. It was a moment of unprecedented change and violence especially for indigenous peoples. By 1850 vibrant public debate between colonised communities had exploded in port cities. Yet in the midst of all of this, Britain struck out by sea and established its supremacy over the Indian and Pacific Oceans, overtaking the French and Dutch as well as other rivals.

Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt.

Focusing on key characters from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, including Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Louis XIV and Charles I, Dark Brilliance is a fascinating and wide-ranging history that explores the human costs of imposing progress and modernity.

From the author of the acclaimed history The Island at the Center of the World, an intimate new epic of the American Revolution that reinforces its meaning for today. With America's founding principles being debated today as never before, Russell Shorto looks back to the era in which those principles were forged. Drawing on new sources, he weaves the lives of six people into a seamless narrative that casts fresh light on the range of experience in colonial America on the cusp of revolution.

In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment - generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion - were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the "darker" pursuits of the esoteric and the occult.

No one present at the Battle of Cape Lopez off the coast of West Africa in 1722 could have known that they were on the edge of history. This obscure yet fierce naval battle would have a monumental impact on British colonies and the future of slavery in America.

The French Revolution was a period of considerable political and social change in France that started in 1789 with the starting of the Estates General and ended in the month of November 1799 with the development of the French Consulate. Tons of its ideas are now regarded important structures of liberal democracy, while terms like liberté, égalité, and fraternité resurfaced in following revolts, which includes the 1917 Russian Revolution, and stimulated efforts to eliminate oppression and attain universal suffrage.

Published in 1791, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man defended the French Revolution’s values of freedom, equality, and brotherhood. He argued that a government based on justice ought to support mankind’s civil rights relating to security and protection, as well as the natural rights to life, liberty, and freedom of conscience. He also proposed plans for universal education, pensions, poverty relief, and social welfare in this classic work that was widely read across the West.

In 1755, New England troops embarked on a "great and noble scheme" to expel 18,000 French-speaking Acadians from Nova Scotia, killing thousands, separating innumerable families, and driving many into forests where they waged a desperate guerrilla resistance. The right of neutrality - to live in peace from the imperial wars waged between France and England - had been one of the founding values of Acadia. John Mack Faragher draws on original research to weave 150 years of history into a gripping narrative of both the civilization of Acadia and the British plot to destroy it.

Between 1500 and 1800, the North Sea region overtook the Mediterranean as the most dynamic part of the world. At its core, the Anglo-Dutch relationship intertwined close alliance and fierce antagonism to intense creative effect. But a precondition for the Industrial Revolution was also the establishment in British North America of a unique type of colony - for the settlement of people and culture, rather than the extraction of things.

Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The History and Legacy of the Haitian Revolution’s Most Famous Leaders chronicles how the only successful slave uprising came about and examines the backgrounds of the men who led it.

Piecing together his family history through archival documents, Tyler LeBlanc tells the story of his ancestor Joseph LeBlanc and the LeBlanc family during the Great Expulsion. A unique biographical approach to the history of the Expulsion, Acadian Driftwood is a vivid insight into one family’s experience of this traumatic event.

Wedlock is the remarkable story of the Countess of Strathmore and her marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary Eleanor Bowes was one of Britain's richest young heiresses. She married the Count of Strathmore, who died young, and, pregnant with her lover's child, Mary became engaged to George Gray. Then in swooped Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary was bowled over and married him within the week. But nothing was as it seemed. Stoney was broke and his pursuit of the wealthy Countess a calculated ploy.