This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Commerce, finance and statecraft charts the emergence of new approaches to England's economic history in the historical writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book explores the work of the period's most influential historians – among them Francis Bacon, William Camden, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras and David Hume – and shows how these writers, and their contemporaries, were engaged in a series of hotly contested, politically–charged debates concerning the management of England's commercial and financial interests. This book will be essential reading for historians and literary critics working on Restoration and eighteenth-century historical writing, and historians, economists, political scientists, and philosophers interested in historiographical theory.
This 1957 text was the first thorough account of the serial publication of books in the eighteenth century. Professor Wiles shows how, first by serialization in newspapers and then by releasing instalments of a work in progress in small packets of sheets stitched in blue paper and delivered regularly to subscribers, English publishers made new and old books available to a great number of readers. It had not previously been realized how extensive the practice was. As a method of publishing it had important effects: because books could be sent out in instalments the high price of books sold was no longer a bar to the spread of literacy and useful knowledge. After explaining the growth of this method from the last years of the seventeenth century until 1750, Professor Wiles gives important chapters to related questions, such as the state of the law of copyright.
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire career of one of Britain's greatest men of letters. It sets in biographical and historical context all of Hume's works, from A Treatise of Human Nature to The History of England, bringing to light the major influences on the course of Hume's intellectual development, and paying careful attention to the differences between the wide variety of literary genres with which Hume experimented. The major events in Hume's life are fully described, but the main focus is on Hume's intentions as a philosophical analyst of human nature, politics, commerce, English history, and religion. Careful attention is paid to Hume's intellectual relations with his contemporaries. The goal is to reveal Hume as a man intensely concerned with the realization of an ideal of open-minded, objective, rigorous, dispassionate dialogue about all the principal questions faced by his age.