Title III. Of Obligations (Art. 1756 - 1760)

Chap. 1. Of the Nature and Division of Obligations (Art. 1756 - 1760)https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/la_civilcode_book_iii/1003/thumbnail.jp

Samuel Holland: From Gunner and Sapper to Surveyor-General 1755-1764

The British Army engaged, in 1755, the young Dutch officer, Samuel Holland (whose patron was already the Third Duke of Richmond), to serve in North America as an artillery and engineering subaltern. Following many months’ service directly under the field commander, Holland became deeply involved in the siege of Louisbourg (1758) as the engineering assistant to James Wolfe. The latter warmly commended Holland to Richmond for his superior efficiency and his bravery under constantly heavy enemy fire. After the siege, Holland drew an accurate plan of the fortified port, illustrating the steps of the siege-attack and defence. He became busy in 1758 and 1759 in the preparation of the British attack on Quebec, during which he met the famous British navigator, James Cook, with whom he exchanged expertise. At the siege of Quebec he continued to serve Wolfe until the latter’s death in the battle of September 1759. From then until 1762 Holland served James Murray, first as part of a team of engineers participating in the defence of Quebec against a French siege, during which he was named acting chief engineer in place of a wounded officer and eventually confined in the city with the rest of the garrison until the siege was raised by the Royal Navy. Thereafter, under Murray’s command, Holland’s main achievement was his part in the surveying and mapping of the St. Lawrence valley, leading to the production of the “Murray Map”, an immense contribution to eighteenth-century cartography. Murray vehemently held, in the face of claims by officers of the Royal Engineers, that Samuel Holland deserved the most credit for the success and high quality of the product. During the Seven Years War, Holland had been promoted Captain. Excluded from the Royal Engineers, he was therefor quite independent of the bureaucracy of that corps when in 1763 he sought-in new American colonies ceded by France-an appointment in surveying and cartography. As a guest in the London house of the Duke of Richmond he had the opportunity of meeting influential politicians, where the recognition by Wolfe and Murray of the high quality of his professional competence finally led the British government to appoint him Surveyor General in North America

The Spectatorial press in Dutch

The present paper outlines the main periods and tendencies in Dutch moral weekly publishing. Although academic research has, for a long time, been focussed on Justus van Effen, who published spectatorial magazines in both French and Dutch, many other writers between 1718 and the 1790s also took part in the endeavour of moral weekly writing or reacted to it by producing ‘anti-spectators’

The contexts and contours of British economic literature, 1660-1760

This article explores some of the main bibliographical dimensions of economic literature at a time when there was much interest in economic matters but no discipline of economics. By looking at what was published in the round much economic literature is shown to be short, ephemeral, unacknowledged, polemical, and legistlatively orientated. This fluidity is underscored by the uncertainties about what constituted key works of economic literature and by the failure of attempts to make sense of that literature through dictionaries and histories. Economic literature in the period was, consequently, more unstable and uncertain than has often been acknowledged. It cannot, therefore, be simply characterized as either 'mercantilist' or nascent 'political economy'

My Land Is My Flesh Silver Bluff, the Creek Indians, and the Transformation of Colonized Space in Early America

This essay explores how Native peoples like the Creek (Muscogee) Indians invested colonized spaces in early American society with their own material, commercial, political, and spiritual meanings and importance. In particular, Creek Indians from the town of Coweta transformed Silver Bluff, the plantation of the trader and merchant George Galphin, into a “white ground,” as a place connected to Creek Country by a “white path,” and as a space where Creek and British leaders congregated to conduct business and negotiate politics. For it is no coincidence that the treaties of Augusta in 1763 and 1773, peaceful resolutions agreed to by the Creeks with the British Empire in 1760, 1764, 1773, 1774, and 1776, the negotiations over boundary lines in 1768 and 1774, and several other instances of cross-cultural dialogue all unfolded, started, or ended at Silver Bluff. The Creeks thereby enfolded occupied spaces like Silver Bluff—and the peoples who inhabited or congregated at such places—into their own worlds and according to their own understandings of those spaces. This process of spatial assimilation by the Creeks was as much collaborative as it was contested with Europeans throughout the eighteenth century

Miscellaneous Letters on Burma, 1755-1760, I, edited by Alexander Dalrymple and re-edited by Michael W. Charney

These letters, and in cases extracts of letters, were reproduced by Alexander Dalrymple in 1808, published in London under the title Oriental Repertory, by William Ballintine for the East India Company. Relevant portions of Dalrymple’s commentary to some letters have also been included. Edited by Michael W. Charney for the SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research

Comparing the correlation length of grain markets in China and France

In economics comparative analysis plays the same role as experimental research in physics. In this paper we closely examine several methodological problems related to comparative analysis by investigating the specific example of grain markets in China and France respectively. This enables us to answer a question in economic history which has so far remained pending, namely whether or not market integration progressed in the 18th century. In economics as in physics, before being accepted any new result has to be checked and re-checked by different researchers. This is what we call the replication and comparison procedures. We show how these procedures should (and can) be implemented.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, to appear in International Journal of Modern Physics

Genesis of d'Alembert's paradox and analytical elaboration of the drag problem

We show that the issue of the drag exerted by an incompressible fluid on a body in uniform motion has played a major role in the early development of fluid dynamics. In 1745 Euler came close, technically, to proving the vanishing of the drag for a body of arbitrary shape; for this he exploited and significantly extended existing ideas on decomposing the flow into thin fillets; he did not however have a correct picture of the global structure of the flow around a body. Borda in 1766 showed that the principle of live forces implied the vanishing of the drag and should thus be inapplicable to the problem. After having at first refused the possibility of a vanishing drag, d'Alembert in 1768 established the paradox, but only for bodies with a head-tail symmetry. A full understanding of the paradox, as due to the neglect of viscous forces, had to wait until the work of Saint-Venant in 1846.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, Physica D, in pres

Carter v Boehm: facts and context

There is a curious irony in the lawsuit Carter v Boehm. The final decision of the Court of King’s Bench, delivered by Chief Justice Mansfield at Easter 1766, famously articulated the principle of uberrima fides (utmost good faith), which became the standard benchmark for disclosure in modern insurance contracts. Yet the insurance policy and claim from which this ruling derived was anything other than standard, and certainly outside the normal scope of anything covered by the British property insurance industry as it had developed by the middle of the eighteenth century. It is not the purpose of this article to explore the legal points about Carter v Boehm or the ramifications of the decision for modern insurance law.1 However, to understand the ruling, and Mansfield’s comments on the scope and nature of liability and disclosure in insurance contracts, it helps to know the facts and context surrounding the case and the nature of the risk that was insured