International Relations and the European Atlantic World, 1660-1830 – serie

This book retraces the life and experience of Princess Louisa Ulrika of Prussia (1720-1782), who became queen of Sweden, with a particular emphasis on her political role and activities. As crown princess (1744-1751), queen (1751-1771) and then queen dowager (1771-1782) of Sweden, Louisa Ulrika took an active role in political matters. From the moment she arrived in Sweden, and throughout her life, Louisa Ulrika worked tirelessly towards increasing the power of the monarchy. Described variously as fierce, proud, haughty, intelligent, self-conscious of her due royal prerogatives, filled with political ambitions, and accused by many of her contemporaries of wanting to restore absolutism, she never diverted from her objective to make the Swedish monarchy stronger, despite obstacles and adversities. As such, she embodied the perfect example of a female consort who was in turn a political agent, instrument and catalyst. More than just a biography, this book places Louisa Ulrika within the wider European context, thus shedding light on gender and politics in the early modern period.

Upon declaring independence from Britain in July 1776, the United States Congress urgently needed to establish its credentials as a legitimate government that could credibly challenge the claims of the British Crown. In large measure this legitimacy rested upon setting in place the procedural and legal structures upon which all claims of governmental authority rest. In this book, Aschenbrenner explores the ways in which the nascent United States rapidly built up a system of parliamentary procedure that borrowed heavily from the British government it sought to replace. In particular, he looks at how, over the course of twenty-five years, Thomas Jefferson drew upon the writings of the Chief Clerk of the British Parliament, John Hatsell, to frame and codify American parliamentary procedures. Published in 1801, Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States presents rules, instances, citations and commentary as modern readers would expect them to appear, quoting Hatsell and other British authorities numerous times. If the two nations suffered any unpleasant relations in the First War for American Independence - Aschenbrenner concludes - one would be hard pressed to detect it from Jefferson’s Manual. Indeed, direct comparison of the House of Commons and the Continental Congress shows remarkable similarities between the ambitions of the two institutions as they both struggled to adapt their political processes to meet the changing national and international circumstances of the late-eighteenth century.

Upon declaring independence from Britain in July 1776, the United States Congress urgently needed to establish its credentials as a legitimate government that could credibly challenge the claims of the British Crown. In large measure this legitimacy rested upon setting in place the procedural and legal structures upon which all claims of governmental authority rest. In this book, Aschenbrenner explores the ways in which the nascent United States rapidly built up a system of parliamentary procedure that borrowed heavily from the British government it sought to replace. In particular, he looks at how, over the course of twenty-five years, Thomas Jefferson drew upon the writings of the Chief Clerk of the British Parliament, John Hatsell, to frame and codify American parliamentary procedures. Published in 1801, Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States presents rules, instances, citations and commentary as modern readers would expect them to appear, quoting Hatsell and other British authorities numerous times. If the two nations suffered any unpleasant relations in the First War for American Independence - Aschenbrenner concludes - one would be hard pressed to detect it from Jefferson’s Manual. Indeed, direct comparison of the House of Commons and the Continental Congress shows remarkable similarities between the ambitions of the two institutions as they both struggled to adapt their political processes to meet the changing national and international circumstances of the late-eighteenth century.

Throughout history, forced labour has been a ubiquitous phenomenon. Ranging from classical slavery to serfdom and indentured workers, unfree labour has taken many forms across time and space. Taking sharp issue with many existing explanations and suppositions, this book interrogates the phenomenon of unfree labour across an ambitious canvass. Through this approach, the book crosses traditional chronological, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries to re-examine transnational narratives by discerning the interconnectivity of unfree labour in a common trans-Eurasian, trans-Atlantic, and trans-Eastern Pacific context, thereby moving beyond the assumed, different causalities, hitherto taken for granted. Having set the broad context of the study, the book then focusses in on a comparative case study of the Brazilian slave and the Russian serf economies of the late 1700s, and their respective commodity production and export figures. This is bolstered by an exploration of the military utility of serfdom, slavery and amorphous forced labour systems in a range of countries including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, Colonial America, the American South, Prussia, the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Muscovite and Imperial Russia. Having established new perspectives on the historical nature of unfree labour, the study concludes with an exploration of the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emancipations of serfs and slaves, arguing that a multiplicity of factors came to bear on the pressure to end forced labour regimes in many distinct ways. In all the book provides an innovative and thought provoking exploration of the most emotive and challenging areas of global historical study.