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States of Creditprovides the first comprehensive look at the joint development of representative assemblies and public borrowing in Europe during the medieval and early modern eras. In this pioneering book, David Stasavage argues that unique advances in political representation allowed certain European states to gain early and advantageous access to credit, but the emergence of an active form of political representation itself depended on two underlying factors: compact geography and a strong mercantile presence. Stasavage shows that active representative assemblies were more likely to be sustained in geographically small polities. These assemblies, dominated by mercantile groups that lent to governments, were in turn more likely to preserve access to credit. Given these conditions, smaller European city-states, such as Genoa and Cologne, had an advantage over larger territorial states, including France and Castile, because mercantile elites structured political institutions in order to effectively monitor public credit. While creditor oversight of public funds became an asset for city-states in need of finance, Stasavage suggests that the long-run implications were more ambiguous. City-states with the best access to credit often had the most closed and oligarchic systems of representation, hindering their ability to accept new economic innovations. This eventually transformed certain city-states from economic dynamos into rentier republics. Exploring the links between representation and debt in medieval and early modern Europe,States of Creditcontributes to broad debates about state formation and Europe's economic rise.

For the Western world, the period from 1760 to 1800 was the great revolutionary era in which the outlines of the modern democratic state came into being. Here for the first time in one volume is R. R. Palmer's magisterial account of this incendiary age. Palmer argues that the American, French, and Polish revolutions—and the movements for political change in Britain, Ireland, Holland, and elsewhere—were manifestations of similar political ideas, needs, and conflicts. Palmer traces the clash between an older form of society, marked by legalized social rank and hereditary or self-perpetuating elites, and a new form of society that placed a greater value on social mobility and legal equality. Featuring a new foreword by David Armitage, this Princeton Classics edition of The Age of the Democratic Revolution introduces a new generation of readers to this enduring work of political history.

This book is the first systematic comparison of the civic integration of Jews in the United States and France--specifically, from the two countries' revolutions through the American republic and the Napoleonic era (1775-1815). Frederic Jaher develops a vehicle for a broader and uniquely rich analysis of French and American nation-building and political culture. He returns grand theory to historical scholarship by examining the Jewish encounter with state formation and Jewish acquisition of civic equality from the perspective of the \"paradigm of liberal inclusiveness\" as formulated by Alexis de Tocqueville and Louis Hartz.

In the first English-language edition of a general, synthetic history of French Jewry from antiquity to the present, Esther Benbassa tells the intriguing tale of the social, economic, and cultural vicissitudes of a people in diaspora. With verve and insight, she reveals the diversity of Jewish life throughout France's regions, while showing how Jewish identity has constantly redefined itself in a country known for both the Rights of Man and the Dreyfus affair. Beginning with late antiquity, she charts the migrations of Jews into France and traces their fortunes through the making of the French kingdom, the Revolution, the rise of modern anti-Semitism, and the current renewal of interest in Judaism. As early as the fourth century, Jews inhabited Roman Gaul, and by the reign of Charlemagne, some figured prominently at court. The perception of Jewish influence on France's rulers contributed to a clash between church and monarchy that would culminate in the mass expulsion of Jews in the fourteenth century. The book examines the re-entry of small numbers of Jews as New Christians in the Southwest and the emergence of a new French Jewish population with the country's acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine. The saga of modernity comes next, beginning with the French Revolution and the granting of citizenship to French Jews. Detailed yet quick-paced discussions of key episodes follow: progress made toward social and political integration, the shifting social and demographic profiles of Jews in the 1800s, Jewish participation in the economy and the arts, the mass migrations from Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, the Dreyfus affair, persecution under Vichy, the Holocaust, and the postwar arrival of North African Jews. Reinterpreting such themes as assimilation, acculturation, and pluralism, Benbassa finds that French Jews have integrated successfully without always risking loss of identity. Published to great acclaim in France, this book brings important current issues to bear on the study of Judaism in general, while making for dramatic reading.

Recent revisionist history has questioned the degree of social and economic change attributable to the French Revolution. Some historians have also claimed that the Revolution was primarily an urban affair with little relevance to the rural masses. This book tests these ideas by examining the Revolutionary, Napoleonic and Restoration attempts to transform the tenure of communal land in one region of southern France; the department of the Gard. By analysing the results of the legislative attempts to privatize common land, this study highlights how the Revolution's agrarian policy profoundly affected French rural society and the economy. Not only did some members of the rural community, mainly small-holding peasants, increase their land holdings, but certain sectors of agriculture were also transformed; these findings shed light on the growth in viticulture in the south of France before the monocultural revolution of the 1850s. The privatization of common land, alongside the abolition of feudalism and the transformation of judicial institutions, were key aspects of the Revolution in the countryside. This detailed study demonstrates that the legislative process was not a top-down procedure, but an interaction between a state and its citizens. It is an important contribution to the new social history of the French Revolution and will appeal to economic and social historians, as well as historical geographers.

After World War II, France embarked on a project of modernization, which included the development of the modern mass home.At Home in Postwar Franceexamines key groups of actors - state officials, architects, sociologists and tastemakers - arguing that modernizers looked to the home as a site for social engineering and nation-building; designers and advocates of the modern home contributed to the democratization of French society; and the French home of theTrente Glorieuses, as it was built and inhabited, was a hybrid product of architects', planners', and residents' understandings of modernity. This volume identifies the \"right to comfort\" as an invention of the postwar period and suggests that the modern mass home played a vital role in shaping new expectations for well-being and happiness.

Mobilizing nature traces the environmental history of war and militarisation in France. It offers a fresh perspective on the well-known conflicts whilst uncovering the largely 'hidden' history of the numerous military bases and other installations that pepper the French countryside.

The 2008 global financial meltdown has redirected attention to the entwinement of financial markets and the urban built environment. Against that background, recent works in urban political economy have focused on how city governments support the rent-maximisation strategies of landowners, thereby reinforcing 'the increasing tendency to treat land as a financial asset' (Harvey, [1982]2006). However, this perspective paradoxically understates the importance of market finance actors, neglecting to demonstrate how, in practice, such financial investors, who have been shown to adopt selective investment practices, shape urban redevelopment projects. In this article, the role of financial investors is analysed through a case study of a large-scale redevelopment project on the outskirts of the Paris city-region (city of Saint-Ouen). The analysis of negotiations over urban design and economic development issues – raised by property developers seeking to fashion commercial properties as investment assets – reveals the unevenness of a local authority's ability to implement an agenda that potentially diverges from the expectations of financial investors. Accordingly, given the growing importance of investors in the ownership of the built environment, the article considers urban redevelopment as the outcome of power relations that originate in the circulation of investors' expectations. These expectations are met through translating market finance categories (risk, return and liquidity) into elements of the urban fabric. This bears substantial consequences for policy-making, given the current context of austerity, as municipal authorities are increasingly constrained to rely on property markets. Urban redevelopment projects are thereby increasingly shaped to provide investment assets for financial investors.

In the last generation the classic Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution has been challenged by the so-called revisionist school. The Marxist view that the Revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution has been questioned by Anglo-Saxon revisionists like Alfred Cobban and William Doyle as well as a French school of criticism headed by François Furet. Today revisionism is the dominant interpretation of the Revolution both in the academic world and among the educated public. Against this conception, this book reasserts the view that the Revolution - the capital event of the modern age - was indeed a capitalist and bourgeois revolution. Based on an analysis of the latest historical scholarship as well as on knowledge of Marxist theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the work confutes the main arguments and contentions of the revisionist school while laying out a narrative of the causes and unfolding of the Revolution from the eighteenth century to the Napoleonic Age.

Increasingly, greening in cities across the Global North is enmeshed in strategies for attracting capital investment, raising the question: for whom is the future green city? Through exploring the relationship between cities’ green boosterist rhetoric, affordability and social equity considerations within greening programmes, this paper examines the extent to which, and why, the degree of green branding – that is, urban green boosterism – predicts the variation in city affordability. We present the results of a mixed methods, macroscale analysis of the greening trajectories of 99 cities in Western Europe, the USA and Canada. Our regression analysis of green rhetoric shows a trend toward higher cost of living among cities with the longest duration and highest intensity green rhetoric. We then use qualitative findings from Nantes, France, and Austin, USA, as two cases to unpack why green boosterism correlates with lower affordability. Key factors determining the relation between urban greening and affordability include the extent of active municipal intervention, redistributional considerations and the historic importance of inclusion and equity in urban development. We conclude by considering what our results mean for the urban greening agenda in the context of an ongoing green growth imperative going forward. 全球北方城市的绿化越来越多地融入吸引资本投资的战略中，这引发了一个问题：未来的绿色城市是为谁而建设的？通过探讨城市绿色倡导者的言论、可负担性和绿化方案中的社会公平考虑之间的关系，本文研究了绿色品牌化程度（即城市绿色倡导）决定城市可负担性变化的程度和原因。我们呈现了采用混合方法，对西欧、美国和加拿大99个城市的绿化轨迹进行宏观分析的研究结果。我们对绿色言论的回归分析表明，在绿色修辞持续时间最长、强度最高的城市中，生活成本呈上升趋势。然后，我们用法国南特和美国奥斯汀的定性研究结果作为两个案例来解释为什么绿色倡导与较低的可负担性相关联。决定城市绿化和可负担性之间关系的关键因素包括积极市政干预的程度、再分配考虑以及包容和公平在城市发展中的历史重要性。最后，我们探讨在当前绿色增长势在必行的背景下，我们的成果对城市绿化议程的意义。