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This book explores how the institution of privilege and liberty shaped early modern economic development in France between 1650 and 1820.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; 1. Introduction: profits and economic development during the Old Régime; 2. Privileged enclaves and the guilds: liberty and regulation; 3. The privilege of liberty put to the test: industrial development in Normandy; 4. Companies, colonies, and contraband: commercial privileges under the Old Régime; 5. Privilege, liberty, and managing the market: trading with the Levant; 6. Outside the body politic, essential to the body economic: the privileges of Jews, Protestants and foreign residents; 7. Privilege, innovation, and the state: entrepreneurialism and the lessons of the Old Régime; 8. The reign of liberty? Privilege after 1789; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Jeff Horn is Professor of History at Manhattan College, New York. He is the author or editor of The Industrial Revolution: History, Documents, and Key Questions (2016), Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution (with Leonard N. Rosenband and Merritt Roe Smith, 2010), The Industrial Revolution: Milestones in Business History (2007), The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1830 (2006), and Qui parle pour la nation? Les élections et les élus de la Champagne méridionale, 1765–1830 (2004). Horn was president of the Western Society for French History in 2013–14. His research has been supported by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, New York University's Faculty Research Network, Manhattan College, and Stetson University, Florida.
Summary
Focusing on the relationship between privilege and liberty, this is a major reinterpretation of economic development in early modern France. It sheds new light on early industrialization, the achievements of Louis XIV, the economics of the Enlightenment, the origins of the French Revolution and comparative economic development.
