Republicanism and the Birth of Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Spain

In 353 B.C., the Greek statesman and orator Demosthenes delivered his famous speech, Against Timocrates. In his oration, Demosthenes defended the political equality safeguarded by Athenian democracy, and warned against oligarchic corruption. In the midst of peace negotiations with Caria, Greek ambassadors had captured an enemy merchant ship, and the Athenian government declared that its goods could be sold for the benefit of the state. Instead, the ambassadors sold them for their own private profit

Introduction. Imperial Times. Towards a History of Imperial Uses of Time

Aim of this introduction to the monographic issue 'Imperial Times. How Europe Used Time to Rule the World (XVIII-XIX Centuries)' is to throw into relief current debates demonstrating the need for greater academic research into imperial times. The question that underlies the contributions to the special issue is how to synchronise the study of history in a postcolonial age; how to navigate history while accounting for the traditional uses of concepts like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernity. This introduction critically distances the logic underpinning periodisations by challenging the uncritical use of a given interval of time as the basis of a neutral partitioning, and takes stock of how postcolonial studies and global historians have drawn attention, in recent years, to the contingent and political origins of these timeframes. It contends that, for all the talk about a \u201ctemporal\u201d and an \u201cimperial turn\u201d, time and empire still appear, at times, to be largely undertheorized in relation to each other. It highlights new conceptualisations brought to the study of temporality in relation to empire by the history of emotions, and of material cultures, put forward by the study of gendered subjectivities, and stimulated by the attention to long-term shifts favoured by novel methodology of environmental history. It takes stock of Reinhart Koselleck\u2019s influence on these historiographical turns, and of recent re-evaluations of his work on time and concepts. Drawing on the hypothesis that conceptions of the future are crucial to our understanding of ideas and practices of time, tradition, history, and change, this introduction also discusses our conception of the history of utopian times, and the specific ties the future has to the history of imperial conceptions and projects. The concluding section is devoted to the methodological purpose behind the special issue: to set out four case studies to trace new pathways for the study of the imperial legacies in the making of a global history of time

Imperial Times: Towards a History of Imperial Uses of Time

In this introduction we discuss the role of periodizations and historical forms of time in the historiography of early modern and modern European empires, and we articulate how an approach that forefronts the role of empires in the construction of modern times can inform pressing historical debates