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The Cambridge History of Rights

The Cambridge History of Rights

The Cambridge History of Rights

Volume 4: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Dan Edelstein, Stanford University, California
Jennifer Pitts, University of Chicago
February 2025
4. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Available
Hardback
9781316519165
$160.00
USD
Hardback

    The age of Enlightenment and revolutions produced some of our best-known declarations of rights, but they did not create the idea of rights. Writers during this age did such a good job at declaring rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of Rights shows that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are better understood as a time of transformation, extending rights-making to meet the needs of a modernizing world. Rights became a means of liberation for religious minorities, the economic downtrodden, women, slaves, and others. But rights also became a means of control, especially in European colonies around the world, as well as in liberal economic regimes that protected property rights. Through twenty-six essays from experts across the world, this volume serves as an authoritative reference for the development of rights across this period of history.

    • Offers wide-ranging scholarly perspectives on all aspects of eighteenth and nineteenth century rights discourse and practice
    • Provides an entry point for students and scholars interested in the history of rights during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
    • Places European developments within imperial, colonial, and global contexts of rights-making

    Product details

    February 2025
    Hardback
    9781316519165
    696 pages
    235 × 161 × 39 mm
    1.24kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Part I. A Revolution in Rights?:
    • 1. Barbeyrac's intervention. Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke David Grewal
    • 2. Rights, mercantile capitalism and the bourgeois revolution: the rise of political economy Martti Koskenniemi
    • 3. Social rights Glauco Schettini and Charles Walton
    • 4. Rights in Enlightenment theories of rights Céline Spector
    • 5. Rights, property, and politics: Hume to Hegel Richard Bourke
    • 6. Antislavery in the age of rights: or, the rights of slaves confront the right to slaves Christopher Leslie Brown
    • 7. The Enlightenment Constitutionalism and the rights of man Vincenzo Ferrone
    • 8. Fundamental rights at the American founding Jud Campbell
    • 9. Declarations of rights Jeremy D. Popkin
    • 10. The rights of women (or women's rights) Karen Offen
    • 11. The image of rights in the French Revolution Adam Lebovitz
    • Part II. Post-Revolutionary Rights:
    • 12. On the nadir of natural rights theory in nineteenth-century Britain Gregory Conti
    • 13. The 1789 declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen: a civil creed of the French republic? Valentine Zuber
    • 14. Rights in the thought of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel Frederick Neuhouser
    • 15. Rights and socialism 1750–1880 Gareth Stedman Jones
    • 16. Economic liberalism and rights in the nineteenth century David Todd
    • 17. Human rights during the 1848 revolutions Mike Rapport
    • Part III. Rights and Empires:
    • 18. Rights and empires: relations of authority Lauren Benton and Jane Burbank
    • 19. Rights in Late Mughal and Early Colonial India Hasan Zahid Siddiqui
    • 20. Rights in the Americas Joshua Simon
    • 21. The free sea: an antislavery of human rights Amy Dru Stanley
    • 22. Abolition and Imperialism in Africa Bronwen Everill
    • 23. Rights in Pan-Asian, Pan-Islamic, and Pan-African thought Cemil Aydin
    • 24. Indigenous rights in settler colonies Saliha Belmessous
    • 25. Catholicism and rights: politics, economics and, sexuality Udi Greenberg
    • 26. (Human) Rights Associations (1775–1898) Wolfgang Schmale.
      Contributors
    • David Grewal, Martti Koskenniemi, Glauco Schettini, Charles Walton, Céline Spector, Richard Bourke, Christopher Leslie Brown, Vincenzo Ferrone, Jud Campbell, Jeremy D. Popkin, Karen Offen, Adam Lebovitz, Gregory Conti, Valentine Zuber, Frederick Neuhouser, Gareth Stedman Jones, David Todd, Mike Rapport, Lauren Benton, Jane Burbank, Hasan Zahid Siddiqui, Joshua Simon, Amy Dru Stanley, Bronwen Everill, Cemil Aydin, Saliha Belmessous, Udi Greenberg, Wolfgang Schmale

    • Editors
    • Dan Edelstein , Stanford University, California

      Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) of Political Science and History at Stanford University.

    • Jennifer Pitts , University of Chicago

      Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.